


4rffi^T?Y OF GONGRESS. 



Slielf-.AL.... 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 



LAST ESSAYS OF 



E L I A. 



BY 



CHARLES LAMB. 




BOSTON: 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 

1892 



U 




X 



.<^ 



IX 






Copyright, 1892, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 



John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



^ 



PREFACE. 

BY A FRIEND OF THE LATE ELIA. 



This poor gentleman, who for some months past had 
been in a declining way, hath at length paid his final 
tribute to nature. 

To say truth, it is time he were gone. The humour 
of the thing, if there was ever much in it, was pretty 
well exhausted ; and a two years' and a half existence 
has been a tolerable duration for a phantom. 

I am now at liberty to confess, that much which I 
have heard objected to my late friend's writings was 
well-founded. Crude they are, I grant you — a sort of 
unlicked, incondite things — villainously pranked in an 
affected array of antique modes and phrases. They had 
not been his^ if they had been other than such ; and 
better it is, that a writer should be natural in a self- 
pleasing quaintness, than to affect a naturalness (so 
called) that should be strange to him. Egotistical they 
have been pronounced by some who did not know, that 
what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (his- 
torically) of another ; as in a former Essay (to save 
many instances) — where under the first person (his 
favourite figure) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a 



iv PREFACE. 

country-boy placed at a London school, far from his 
friends and connections — in direct opposition to his 
own early history. If it be egotism to imply and twine 
with his own identity the griefs and affections of an- 
other — making himself many, or reducing many unto 
himself — then is the skilful novelist, who all along 
brings in his hero, or heroine, speaking of themselves, 
the greatest egotist of all; who yet has never, there- 
fore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall 
the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who doubt- 
less, under cover of passion uttered by another, often- 
times gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, 
and expresses his own story modestly? 

My late friend was in many respects a singular char- 
acter. Those who did not like him, hated him ; and 
some, who once liked him, afterwards became his 
bitterest haters. The truth is, he gave himself too little 
concern what he uttered, and in whose presence. He 
observed neither time nor place, and would e'en out 
with what came uppermost. With the severe religion- 
ist he would pass for a free-thinker ; while the other 
faction set him down for a bigot, or persuaded them- 
selves that he belied his sentiments. Few understood 
him ; and I am not certain that at all times he quite 
understood himself. He too much affected that danger- 
ous figure — irony. He sowed doubtful speeches, and 
reaped plain, unequivocal hatred. — He would interrupt 
the gravest discussion with some light jest ; and yet, per- 
haps, not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand 
it. Your long and much talkers hated him. The in- 
formal habit of his mind, joined to an inveterate im- 



PREFACE. V 

pediment of speech, forbade him to be an orator ; 
and he seemed determined that no one else should 
play that part when he was present. He was petit and 
ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen 
him sometimes in what is called good company, but 
where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected 
for an odd fellow ; till some unlucky occasion provok- 
ing it, he would stutter out some senseless pun (not alto- 
gether senseless perhaps, if rightly taken), which has 
stamped his character for the evening. It was hit or 
miss with him ; but nine times out of ten, he con- 
trived by this device to send away a whole company 
his enemies. His conceptions rose kindlier than his 
utterance, and his happiest impromptus had the ap- 
pearance of effort. He has been accused of trying to 
be witty, when in truth he was but struggling to give his 
poor thoughts articulation. He chose his companions 
for some individuality of character which they mani- 
fested. — Hence, not many persons of science, and 
few professed literati, were of his councils. They were, 
for the most part, persons of an uncertain fortune ; 
and, as to such people commonly nothing is more ob- 
noxious than a gentleman of settled (though moderate) 
income, he passed with most of them for a great miser. 
To my knowledge this was a mistake. His intimados, 
to confess a truth, were in the world's eye a ragged 
regiment. He found them floating on the surface of 
society ; and the colour, or something else, in the 
weed pleased him. The burrs stuck to him — but 
they were good and loving burrs for all that. He 
never greatly cared for the society of what are called 



t^ 



Vi PREFACE. 

good people. If any of these were scandalised (and 
offences were sure to arise), he could not help it. 
When he has been remonstrated with for not making 
more concessions to the feelings of good people, he 
would retort by asking, what one point did these good 
people ever concede to him? He was temperate in 
his meals and diversions, but always kept a litde on 
this side of abstemiousness. Only in the use of the 
Indian weed he might be thought a little excessive. 
He took it, he would say, as a solvent of speech. 
Marry — as the friendly vapour ascended, how his 
pratde would curl up sometimes with it ! the ligaments, 
which tongue-tied him, were loosened, and the stam- 
merer proceeded a statist ! 

I do not know whether I ought to bemoan or rejoice 
that my old friend is departed. His jests were begin- 
ning to grow obsolete, and his stories to be found out. 
He felt the approaches of age ; and while he pre- 
tended to cling to life, you saw how slender were the 
ties left to bind him. Discoursing with him latterly on 
this subject, he expressed himself with a pettishness, 
which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about 
his suburban retreat (as he called it) at Shackle well, 
some children belonging to a school of industry had 
met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an 
especial manner to him. '^ They take me for a visiting 
governor," he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, 
which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything 
important and parochial. He thought that he ap- 
proached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a 
general aversion from being treated like a grave or 



PREFACE. Yii 

respectable character, and kept a weary eye upon the 
advances of age that should so entitle him. He 
herded always, while it was possible, with people 
younger than himself. He did not conform to the 
march of time, but was dragged along in the proces- 
sion. His manners lagged behind his years. He was 
too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never 
sate gracefully on his shoulders. The impressions of 
infancy had burnt into him, and he resented the 
impertinence of manhood. These were weaknesses; 
but such as they were, they are a key to explicate 
some of his writings. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

Preface iii 

^ BlAKESMOOR in H SHIRE I 

J Poor Relations 9 

Stage Illusion 2a 

To THE Shade of Elliston 26 

■ Ellistoniana 30 

Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading . . 39 

*.)The Old Margate Hoy 49 

The Convalescent 62 

Sanity of True Genius , 69 

Captain Jackson . . . . : 75 

• The Superannuated Man .• 82 

' The Genteel Style in Writing 94 

« Barbara S 102 

■The Tombs in the Abbey 11 1 

Amicus Redivivus 116 

Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney 124 

Newspapers Thirty-five Years Ago ...... 137 

.Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the 

Productions of Modern Art 149 

Rejoicings upon the New Year's Coming of Age 167 

The Wedding ■ . •. 176 



X CONTENTS. 

Page 

\JThe Child Angel > ^^6 

pA Death-bed ^9^ 

'/Old China = c . . 194 

Popular Fallacies — 

I. That a Bully is always a Coward . • = . . . 204 

II. That Ill-gotten Gain never Prospers .... 205 

III. That a Man must not Laugh at his own Jest. . 206 

IV. That such a one shows his Breeding. — That it 

is easy to perceive he is no Gentleman . . . 207 

V. That the Poor copy the Vices of the Rich . . . 208 

VI. That Enough is as good as a Feast 211 

VIL Of two Disputants, the Warmest is generally in 

the Wrong . 212 

VIII. That Verbal Allusions are not Wit, because they 

will not bear Translation .214 

IX. That the Worst Puns are the Best 215 

X. That Handsome Is that Handsome Does . . . 218 

XL That we must not Look a Gift-horse in the Mouth 222 

XII. That Home is Home though it is never so Homely 225 

XIII. That you must Love me, and Love my Dog . . 232 

XIV. That we should Rise with the Lark 238 

XV. That we should Lie Down with the Lamb ... 241 

XVI. That a Sulky Temper is a Misfortune .... 244 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 



I DO not know a pleasure more affecting than to 
range at will over the deserted apartments of some 
fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct gran- 
deur admit of a better passion than envy : and con- 
templations on the great and good, whom we fancy 
in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for 
us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern 
occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. 
The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us be- 
tween entering an empty and a crowded church. In 
the latter it is chance but some present human frailty 

— an act of inattention on the part of some of the 
auditory — or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain- 
glory, on that of the preacher — puts us by our best 
thoughts, disharmonising the place and the occasion. 
But would'st thou know the beauty of holiness ? — go 
alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good 
Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some coun- 
try church : think of the piety that has kneeled there 

— the congregations, old and young, that have found 



2 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

consolation there — the meek pastor — the docile 
parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross 
conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of 
the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motion- 
less as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around 
thee. 

Journeying northward lately, I could not resist going 
some few miles out of my road to look upon the re- 
mains of an old great house with which I had been 
impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised 
that the owner of it had lately pulled it down ; still I 
had a vague notion that it could not all have perished, 
that so much solidity with magnificence could not 
have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and 
rubbish which I found it. 

The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand 
indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had re- 
duced it to — an antiquity. 

I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. 
Where had stood the great gates? What bounded 
the court-yard ? Whereabout did the out-houses com- 
mence? a few bricks only lay as representatives of 
that which was so stately and so spacious. 

Death does not shrink up his human victim at this 
rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their 
proportion. 

Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their 
process of destruction, at the plucking of every pannel 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 3 

I should have felt the varlets at my heart. I should 
have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of 
the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I 
used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat be- 
fore, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary 
wasp that ever haunted it about me — - it is in mine 
ears now, as oft as summer returns ; or a pannel of 
the yellow room. 

Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me 
had magic in it. The tapestried bed-rooms — tap- 
estry so much better than painting — not adorning 
merely, but peopling the wainscots — at which child- 
hood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its 
coverlid (replaced as quickly) to exercise its tender 
courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those 
stern bright visages, staring reciprocally — all Ovid on 
the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. 
Actaeon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery 
of Diana ; and the still more provoking, and almost 
culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, delib- 
erately divesting of Marsyas. 

Then, that haunted room ~— in which old Mrs. 
Battle died — whereinto I have crept, but always in 
the day-time, with a passion of fear ; and a sneaking 
curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with 
the past. — How shall they build it up again ? 

It was an old deserted place, yet not so long de- 
serted but that traces of the splendour of past immates 



4 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still 
standing — even to the tarnished gilt leather battle- 
dores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks in the 
nursery, which told that children had once played 
there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range 
at will of every apartment, knew every nook and 
corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere. 

The solitude of childhood is not so much the 
mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and 
silence, and admiration. So strange a passion for the 
place possessed me in those years, that, though there 
lay — I shame to say how few roods distant from the 
mansion — half hid by trees, what I judged some 
romantic lake, such was the spell which bound me to 
the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its 
strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay 
unexplored for me ; and not till late in life, curiosity 
prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my aston- 
ishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus 
Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, exten- 
sive prospects — and those at no great distance from 
the house — I was told of such — what were they to 
me, being out of the boundaries of my Eden ? — So 
far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, me- 
thought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison ; 
and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture 
of those excluding garden walls. I could have ex- 
claimed with that garden-loving poet — 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 5 

Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines; 
Curl me about, ye gadding vines ; 
And oh so close your circles lace, 
That I may never leave this place ; 
But, lest your fetters prove too weak, 
Ere I your silken bondage break. 
Do you, O brambles, chain me too. 
And, courteous briars, nail me through. 

I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug firesides — 
the low-built roof — parlours ten feet by ten — frugal 
boards, and all the homeliness of home — these were 
the condition of my birth — the wholesome soil which 
I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their 
tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances 
of something beyond ; and to have taken, if but a 
peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a 
great fortune. 

To have the feehng of gentility, it is not necessary 
to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry 
may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to 
an importunate race of ancestors ; and the coatless 
antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long 
line of a Mowbray's or De Chfford's pedigree, at those 
sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity 
as those who do inherit them. The claims of birth 
are ideal merely, and what herald shall go about to 
strip me of an idea ? Is it trenchant to their swords ? 
can it be hacked off as a spur can ? or torn away like 
a tarnished garter? 



5 BLAKESMOOR IN H— SHIRE. 

What, else, were the families of the great to us? 
what pleasure should we take in their tedious gene- 
alogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments ? What 
to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our 
own did not answer within us to a cognate and cor- 
respondent elevation? 

Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 
*Scutcheon that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy 
princely stairs, Blakesmoor ! have I in childhood so 
oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters — thy 
emblematic supporters, with their prophetic " Re- 
surgam " —till, every dreg of peasantry purging off, I 
received into myself Very Gentility? Thou wert first 
in my morning eyes ; and of nights, hast detained my 
steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing 
at thee to dreaming on thee. 

This is the only true gentry by adoption ; the veri- 
table change of blood, and not, as empirics have 
fabled, by transfusion. 

Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid 
trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its fading 
rags, and colours cobweb- stained, told that its subject 
was of two centuries back. 

And what if my ancestor at that date was some 
Damoetas — feeding flocks, not his own, upon the 
hills of "Lincoln — did I in less earnest vindicate to 
myself the family trappings of this once proud ^gon ? 
— repaying by a backward triumph the insults he 



BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 7 

might possibly have heaped in his life-time upon my 
poor pastoral progenitor. 

If it were presumption so to speculate, the present 
owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. 
They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers 
for a newer trifle ; and I was left to appropriate to 
myself what images I could pick up, to raise my 
fancy, or to soothe my vanity. 

I was the true descendant of those old W s ; 

and not the present family of that name, who had 
fled the old waste places. 

Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, 
which as I have gone over, giving them in fancy my 
own family name, one — and then another — would 
seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to 
recognise the new relationship ; while the rest looked 
grave, as it seemed, at the vacancy in their dwelhng, 
and thoughts of fled posterity. 

That Beauty with the cool blue pastoral drapery, 
and a lamb — that hung next the great bay window 

— with the bright yellow H shire hair, and eye of 

watchet hue — so like my Alice ! — I am persuaded 
she was a true Elia — Mildred Elia, I take it. 

Mine too, Blakesmoor, was thy noble Marble Hall, 
with its mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars — 
stately busts in marble — ranged round: of whose 
countenances, young reader of faces as I was, the 
frowning beauty of Nero, I remember, had most of 



8 BLAKESMOOR IN H SHIRE. 

my wonder ; but the mild Galba had my love. There 
they stood m the coldness of death, yet freshness of 
immortality. 

Mine too, thy lofty Justice Hall, with its one chair 
of authority, high-backed and wickered, once the 
terror of luckless poacher, or self- forgetful maiden — 
so common since, that bats have roosted in it. 

Mine too — whose else? — thy costly fruit-garden, 
with its sun-baked southern wall ; the ampler pleasure- 
garden, rising backwards from the house in triple ter- 
races, with flower-pots now of palest lead, save that a 
speck here and there, saved from the elements, be- 
spake their pristine state to have been gilt and ght- 
tering ; the verdant quarters backwarder still ; and, 
stretchmg still beyond, in old formality, thy firry 
wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day- 
long murmuring woodpigeon, with that antique image 
in the centre, God or Goddess I wist not ; but child 
of Athens or old Rome paid never a sincerer worship 
to Pan or to Sylvanus in their native groves, than I to 
that fragmental mystery. 

Was it for this, that I kissed my childish hands too 
fervently in your idol worship, walks and windings of 
Blakesmoor ! for this, or what sin of mine, has the 
plough passed over your pleasant places? I some- 
times think that as men, when they die, do not die 
all, so of their extinguished habitations there may be 
a hope — a germ to be revivified. 



POOR RELATIONS. 



A Poor Relation — is the most irrelevant thing in 
nature, — a piece of impertinent correspondency, — 
an odious approximation, — a haunting conscience, 
— a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon- 
tide of your prosperity, — an unwelcome remem- 
brancer, — a perpetually recurring mortification, — a 
drain on your purse, — a more intolerable dun upon 
your pride, — a drawback upon success, — a rebuke 
to your rising, — a stain in your blood, — a blot on 
your scutcheon, — a rent in your garment, — a death's 
head at your banquet, — Agathocles' pot, — a Mor- 
decai in your gate, — a Lazarus at your door, — a 
lion in your path, — a frog in your chamber, — a fly 
in your ointment, — a mote in your eye, — a triumph 
to your enemy, an apology to your friends, — the one 
thing not needful, — the hail in harvest, — the ounce 
of sour in a pound of sweet. 

He is known by his knock. Your heart telleth you 

"That is Mr. ." A rap, between familiarity and 

respect ; that demands, and, at the same time, seems 



10 POOR RELATIONS. 

to despair of, entertainment. He entereth smiling, 
and — embarrassed. He holdeth out his hand to you 
to shake, and — draweth it back again. He casually 
looketh in about dinner time — when the table is full. 
He offereth to go away, seeing you have company — 
but is induced to stay. He filleth a chair, and your 
visitor's two children are accommodated at a side 
table. He never cometh upon open days, when your 
wife says with some complacency, " My dear, perhaps 

Mr. will drop in to-day." He remembereth 

birth-days — and professeth he is fortunate to have 
stumbled upon one. He declareth against fish, the 
turbot being small — yet suffereth himself to be im- 
portuned into a sHce against his first resolution. He 
sticketh by the port — yet will be prevailed upon to 
empty the remainder glass of claret, if a stranger press 
it upon him. He is a puzzle to the servants, who are 
fearful of being too obsequious, or ,not civil enough, 
to him. The guests think " they have seen him be- 
fore." Every one speculateth upon his condition ; 
and the most part take him to be — a tide-waiter. 
He calleth you by your Christian name, to imply that 
his other is the same with your own. He is too fa- 
miliar by half, yet you wish he had less diffidence. 
With half the familiarity he might pass for a casual 
dependent; with more boldness he would be in no 
danger of being taken for what he is. He is too 
humble for a friend, yet taketh on him more state 



POOR RELATIONS. II 

than befits a client. He is a worse guest than a 
country tenant, inasmuch as he bringeth up no rent 
— yet 'tis odds, from his garb and demeanour, that 
your guests take him for one. He is asked to make 
one at the whist table; refuseth on the score of 
poverty, and — resents being left out. When the 
company break up, he proffereth to go for a coach — 
and lets the servant go. He recollects your grand- 
father j and will thrust in some mean, and quite unim- 
portant anecdote of — the family. He knew it when 
it was not quite so flourishing as " he is blest in see- 
ing it now." He reviveth past situations, to institute 
what he calleth — favourable comparisons. With a 
reflecting sort of congratulation, he will inquire the 
price of your furniture ; and insults you with a special 
commendation of your window-curtains. He is of 
opinion that the urn is the more elegant shape, but, 
after all, there was something more comfortable about 
the old tea-kettle — which you must remember. He 
dare say you must find a great convenience in having 
a carriage of your own, and appealeth to your lady if 
it is not so. Inquireth if you have had your arms 
done on vellum yet; and did not know till lately, 
that such-and-such had been the crest of the family. 
His memory is unseasonable ; his comphments per- 
verse ; his talk a trouble ; his stay pertinacious ; and 
when he goeth away, you dismiss his chair into a 
corner, as precipitately as possible, and feel fairly rid 
of two nuisances. 



12 POOR RELATIONS. 

There is a worse evil under the sun, and that is — 
a female Poor Relation. You may do something with 
the other ; you may pass him off tolerably well ; but 
your indigent she-relative is hopeless. " He is an 
old humourist," you may say, "and affects to go 
threadbare. His circumstances are better than folks 
would take them to be. You are fond of having a 
Character at your table, and truly he is one." But in 
the indications of female poverty there can be no dis- 
guise. No woman dresses below herself from caprice. 
The truth must out without shuffling. " She is plainly 

related to the L s ; or what does she at their 

house? " She is, in all probability, your wife's cousin. 
Nine times out of ten, at least, this is the case. Her 
garb is something between a gentlewoman and a 
beggar, yet the former evidently predominates. She 
is most provokingly humble, and ostentatiously sen- 
sible to her inferiority. He may require to be re- 
pressed sometimes — aliquando siifflaminandiis erat 
— but there is no raising her. You send her soup at 
dinner, and she begs to be helped — after the gentle- 
men. Mr. requests the honour of taking wine 

with her; she hesitates between Port and Madeira, 
and chooses the former — because he does. She calls 
the servant Sir ; and insists on not troubling him to 
hold her plate. The housekeeper patronizes her. The 
children's governess takes upon her to correct her, 
when she has mistaken the piano for a harpsichord. 



POOR RELATIONS. 13 

Richard Amlet, Esq., in the play, is a notable in- 
stance of the disadvantages, to which this chimerical 
notion of affinity constituting a claim to acquaintance, 
may subject the spirit of a gentleman. A little foolish 
blood is all that is betwixt him and a lady with a great 
estate. His stars are perpetually crossed by the ma- 
lignant maternity of an old woman, who persists in 
calling him " her son Dick." But she has wherewithal 
in the end to recompense his indignities, and float 
him again upon the brilliant surface, under which it 
had been her seeming business and pleasure all along 
to sink him. All men, besides, are not of Dick's tem- 
perament. I knew an Amlet in real life, who, wanting 

Dick's buoyancy, sank indeed. Poor W was of 

my own standing at Christ's, a fine classic, and a youth 
of promise. If he had a blemish, it was too much 
pride ; but its quality was inoffensive ; it was not of 
that sort which hardens the heart, and serves to keep 
inferiors at a distance ; it only sought to ward oft' 
derogation from itself. It was the principle of self- 
respect carried as far as it could go, without infring- 
ing upon that respect, which he would have every one 
else equally maintain for himself. He would have 
you to think alike with him on this topic. Many a 
quarrel have I had with him, when we were rather 
older boys, and our tallness made us more obnoxious 
to observation in the blue clothes, because I would 
not thread the alleys and blind ways of the town with 



14 POOR RELATIONS. 

him to elude notice, when we have been out together 
on a holiday in the streets of this sneering and prying 

metropoUs. W = went, sore with these notions, to 

Oxford, where the dignity and sweetness of a scholar's 
life, meeting with the alloy of a humble introduction, 
wrought in him a passionate devotion to the place, 
with a profound aversion from the society. The ser- 
vitor's gown (worse than his school array) clung to 
him with Nessian venom. He thought himself ridic- 
ulous in a garb, under which Latimer must have 
walked erect ; and in which Hooker, in his young 
days, possibly flaunted in a vein of no discommend- 
able vanity. In the depth of college shades, or in 
his lonely chamber, the poor student shrunk from ob- 
servation. He found shelter among books, which 
insult not ; and studies, that ask no questions of a 
youth's finances. He was lord of his library, and sel- 
dom cared for looking out beyond his domains. The 
healing influence of studious pursuits was upon him, 
to soothe and to abstract. He was almost a healthy 
man ; when the waywardness of his fate broke out 
against him with a second and worse malignity. The 

father of W had hitherto exercised the humble 

profession of house-painter at N , near Oxford. 

A supposed interest with some of the heads of col- 
leges had now induced him to take up his abode in 
that city, with the hope of being employed upon some 
public works which were talked of. From that mo- 



POOR RELATIONS. 15 

ment I read in the countenance of the young man, 
the determination which at length tore him from 
academical pursuits for ever. To a person unac- 
quainted with our Universities, the distance between 
the gownsmen and the townsmen, as they are called — 
the trading part of the latter especially — is carried 
to an excess that would appear harsh and incredible. 

The temperament of W 's father was diametrically 

the reverse of his own. Old W was a little, busy, 

Clinging tradesman, who, with his son upon his arm, 
would stand bowing and scraping, cap in hand, to 
any thing that wore the semblance of a gown — insen- 
sible to the winks and opener remonstrances of the 
young man, to whose chamber-fellow, or equal in 
standing, perhaps, he was thus obsequiously and gra- 
tuitously ducking. Such a state of things could not 

last. W must change the air of Oxford or be 

suffocated. He chose the former ; and let the sturdy 
moralist, who strains the point of the filial duties as 
high as they can bear, censure the dereliction ; he 

cannot estimate the struggle. I stood with W , 

the last afternoon I ever saw him, under the eaves of 
his paternal dwelling. It was in the fine lane leading 
from the High-street to the back of * * * * * college, 
where W kept his rooms. He seemed thought- 
ful, and more reconciled. I ventured to rally him — 
finding him in a better mood — upon a representation 
of the Artist Evangelist, which the old man, whose 



l6 POOR RELATIONS. 

affairs were beginning to flourish, had caused to be 
set up in a splendid sort of frame over his really hand- 
some shop, either as a token of prosperity, or badge 

of gratitude to his saint. W looked up at the 

Luke, and, like Satan, "knew his mounted sign — and 
fled." A letter on his father's table the next morning, 
announced that he had accepted a commission in a 
regiment about to embark for Portugal. He was 
among the first who perished before the walls of St. 
Sebastian. 

I do not know how, upon a subject which I began 
with treating half seriously, I should have fallen upon 
a recital so eminently painful ; but this theme of poor 
relationship is replete with so much matter for tragic 
as well as comic associations, that it is difficult to 
keep the account distinct without blending. The 
earliest impressions which I received on this matter, 
are certainly not attended with anything painful, or 
very humiliating, in the recalling. At my father's 
table (no very splendid one) was to be found, every 
Saturday, the mysterious figure of an aged gentleman, 
clothed in neat black, of a sad yet comely appear- 
ance. His deportment was of the essence of gravity ; 
his words few or none ; and I was not to make a noise 
in his presence. I had little inclination to have done 
so — for hiy cue was to admire in silence. A partic- 
ular elbow chair was appropriated to him, which was 
in no case to be violated. A peculiar sort of sweet 



POOR RELATIONS. ly 

pudding, which appeared on no other occasion, dis- 
tinguished the days of his coming. I used to think 
him a prodigiously rich man. All I could make out 
of him was, that he and my father had been school- 
fellows a world ago at Lincoln, and that he came from 
the Mint. The Mint I knew to be a place where all 
the money was coined — and I thought he was the 
owner of all that money. Awful ideas of the Tower 
twined themselves about his presence. He seemed 
above human infirmities and passions. A sort of mel- 
ancholy grandeur invested him. From some inex- 
plicable doom I fancied him obliged to go about in 
an eternal suit of mourning; a captive— a stately 
being, let out of the Tower on Saturdays. Often have 
I wondered at the temerity of my father, who, in spite 
of an habitual general respect which we all in common 
manifested towards him, would venture now and then 
to stand up against him in some argument, touching 
their youthful days. The houses of the ancient city 
of Lincoln are divided (as most of my readers know) 
between the dwellers on the hill, and in the valley. 
This marked distinction formed an obvious division 
between the boys who lived above (however brought 
together in a common school) and the boys whose 
paternal residence was on the plain ; a sufficient cause 
of hostility in the code of these young Grotiuses. 
My father had been a leading Mountaineer; and 
would still maintain the general superiority, in skill 



1 8 POOR RELATIONS. 

and hardihood, of the Above Boys (his own faction) 
over the Below Boys (so were they called), of which 
party his contemporary had been a chieftain. Many 
and hot were the skirmishes on this topic — the only 
one upon which the old gentleman was ever brought 
out — and bad blood bred; even sometimes almost 
to the recommencement (so I expected) of actual 
hostilities. But my father, who scorned to insist upon 
advantages, generally contrived to turn the conversa- 
tion upon some adroit by-conimendation of the old 
Minster ; in the general preference of which, before 
all other cathedrals in the island, the dweller on the 
hill, and the plain-born, could meet on a conciliating 
level, and lay down their less important differences. 
Once only I saw the old gentleman really ruffled, and 
I remembered with anguish the thought that came 
over me : " Perhaps he will never come here again." 
He had been pressed to take another plate of the 
viand, which I have already mentioned as the indis- 
pensable concomitant of his visits. He had refused, 
with a resistance amounting to rigour — when my aunt, 
an old Lincolnian, but who had something of this, in 
common with my cousin Bridget, that she would some- 
times press civility out of season — uttered the follow- 
ing memorable application — *' Do take another slicCj 
Mr. Billet, for you do not get pudding every day." 
The old gentleman said nothing at the time — but he 
took occasion in the course of the evening, when 



POOR RELATIONS. 19 

some argument had intervened between them, to utter 
with an emphasis which chilled the company, and 
which chills me now as I write it — " Woman, you 
are superannuated." John Billet did not survive 
long, after the digesting of this affront ; but he sur- 
vived long enough to assure me that peace was actu- 
ally restored ! and, if I remember aright, another 
pudding was discreetly substituted in the place of 
that which had occasioned the offence. He died at 
the Mint (Anno 1781) where he had long held, what 
he accounted, a comfortable independence ; and with 
five pounds, fourteen shillings, and a penny, which 
were found in his escrutoire after his decease, left the 
world, blessing God that he had enough to bury him, 
and that he had never been obliged to any man for a 
sixpence. This was — a Poor Relation. 



STAGE ILLUSION. 



A PLAY is said to be well or ill acted in proportion 
to the scenical illusion produced. Whether such 
illusion can in any case be perfect, is not the question. 
The nearest approach to it, we are told, is, when the 
actor appears wholly unconscious of the presence of 
spectators. In tragedy — in all which is to affect the 
feelings — this undivided attention to his stage busi- 
ness, seems indispensable. Yet it is, in fact, dispensed 
with every day by our cleverest tragedians ; and while 
these references to an audience, in the shape of rant 
or sentiment, are not too frequent or palpable, a suffi- 
cient quantity of illusion for the purposes of dramatic 
interest may be said to be produced in spite of them. 
But, tragedy apart, it may be inquired whether, in 
certain characters in comedy, especially those which 
are a little, extravagant, or which involve some notion 
repugnant to the moral sense, it is not a proof of the 
highest skill in the comedian when, without absolutely 
appealing to an audience, he keeps up a tacit under- 
standing with them ; and makes them, unconsciously 



STAGE ILLUSION. 21 

to themselves, a party in the scene. The utmost 
nicety is required in the mode of doing this ; but we 
speak only of the great artists in the profession. 

The most mortifying infirmity in human nature, to 
feel in ourselves, or to contemplate in another, is, 
perhaps, cowardice. To see a coward done to the life 
upon a stage would produce any thing but mirth. 
Yet we most of us remember Jack Bannister's cow- 
ards. Could any thing be more agreeable, more 
pleasant? We loved the rogues. How was this 
effected but by the exquisite art of the actor in a 
perpetual sub-insinuation to us, the spectators, even 
in the extremity of the shaking fit, that he was not 
half such a coward as we took him for? We saw 
all the common symptoms of the malady upon him ; 
the quivering lip, the cowering knees, the teeth chat- 
tering ; and could have sworn ^' that man was fright- 
ened." But we forgot all the while — or kept it 
almost a secret to ourselves — that he never once 
lost his self-possession; that he let out by a thou- 
sand droll looks and gestures — meant at us, and 
not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the 
scene, that his confidence in his own resources had 
never once deserted him. Was this a genuine pic- 
ture of a coward ? or not rather a likeness, which the 
clever artist contrived to palm upon us instead of 
an original ; while we secretly connived at the de- 
lusion for the purpose of greater pleasure, than a 



22 STAGE ILLUSION. 

more genuine counterfeiting of the imbecility, help- 
lessness, and utter self-desertion, which we know to 
be concomitants of cowardice in real life, could have 
given us? 

Why are misers so hateful in the world, and so 
endurable on the stage, but because the skilful actor, 
by a sort of sub-reference, rather than direct appeal 
to us, disarms the character of a great deal of its 
odiousness, by seeming to engage our compassion 
for the insecure tenure by which he holds his money 
bags and parchments? By this subtle vent half of 
the hatefulness of the character — the self-closeness 
with which in real life it coils itself up from the 
sympathies of men — evaporates. The miser be- 
comes sympathetic ; i. e. is no genuine miser. Here 
again a diverting likeness is substituted for a very 
disagreeable reality. 

Spleen, irritability — the pitiable infirmities of old 
men, which produce only pain to behold in the 
realities, counterfeited upon a stage, divert not alto- 
gether for the comic appendages to them, but in 
part from an inner conviction that they are being 
acted before us ; that a likeness only is going on, 
and not the thing itself. They please by being done 
under the hfe, or beside it ; not to the life. When 
Gatty acts an old man, is he angry indeed? or only 
a pleasant counterfeit, just enough of a likeness to 
recognise, without pressing upon us the uneasy sense 
of reality? 



STAGE ILLUSION. 23 

Comedians, paradoxical as it may seem, may be 
too natural. It was the case with a late actor. 
Nothing could be more earnest or true than the 
manner of Mr. Emery; this told excellently in his 
Tyke, and characters of a tragic cast. But when he 
carried the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to 
the stage business, and wilful bhndness and oblivion 
of everything before the curtain into his comedy, 
it produced a harsh and dissonant effect. He was 
out of keeping with the rest of the Personce Dramatis. 
There was as little link between him and them as 
betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third 
estate, dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all. Individu- 
ally considered, his execution was masterly. But 
comedy is not this unbending thing ; for this reason, 
that the same degree of credibihty is not required 
of it as to serious scenes. The degrees of credibility 
demanded to the two things may be illustrated by 
the different sort of truth which we expect when a 
man tells us a mournful or a merry story. If we 
suspect the former of falsehood in any one tittle, we 
reject it altogether. Our tears refuse to flow at a 
suspected imposition. But the teller of a mirthful 
tale has latitude allowed him. We are content with 
less than absolute truth. 'Tis the same with dra- 
matic illusion. We confess we love in comedy to 
see an audience naturahsed behind the scenes, taken 
in into the interest of the drama, welcomed as by- 



24 STAGE ILLUSION. 

standers however. There is something ungracious 
in a comic actor holding himself aloof from all par- 
ticipation or concern with those who are come to be 
diverted by him. Macbeth must see the dagger, 
and no ear but his own be told of it ; but an old 
fool in farce may think he sees somethmg, and by 
conscious words and looks express it, as plainly as 
he can speak, to pit, box, and gallery. When an 
impertinent in tragedy, an Osric, for instance, breaks 
in upon the serious passions of the scene, we approve 
of the contempt with which he is treated. But when 
the pleasant impertinent of comedy, in a piece purely 
meant to give delight, and raise mirth out of whim- 
sical perplexities, worries the studious man with tak- 
ing up his leisure, or making his house his home, 
the same sort of contempt expressed (however 
natural) would destroy the balance of delight in 
the spectators. To make the intrusion comic, the 
actor who plays the annoyed man must a little desert 
nature ; he must, in short, be thinking of the audi- 
ence, and express only so much dissatisfaction and 
peevishness as is consistent with the pleasure of 
comedy. In other words, his perplexity must seem 
half put on. If he repel the intruder with the sober 
set face of a man in earnest, and more especially if 
he deliver his expostulations in a tone which in the 
world must necessarily provoke a duel ; his real-life 
manner will destroy the whimsical and purely dra- 



STAGE ILLUSION. 25 

matic existence of the other character (which to 
render it comic demands an antagonist comicality 
on the part of the character opposed to it), and 
convert what was meant for mirth, rather than be- 
Hef, into a downright piece of impertinence indeed, 
which would raise no diversion in us, but rather stir 
pain, to see inflicted in earnest upon any unworthy 
person. A very judicious actor (in most of his 
parts) seems to have fallen into an error of this 
sort in his playing with Mr. Wrench in the farce of 
Free' and Easy. 

Many instances would be tedious ; these may suf- 
fice to show that comic acting at least does not 
always demand from the performer that strict ab- 
straction from all reference to an audience, which 
is exacted of it; but that in some cases a sort of 
compromise may take place, and all the purposes 
of dramatic delight be attained by a judicious under- 
standing, not too openly announced, between the 
ladies and gentlemen — on both sides of the curtain. . 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 



JoYOUSEST of once embodied spirits, whither at 
length hast thou flown? to what genial region are 
we permitted to conjecture that thou hast flitted. 

Art thou sowing thy wild oats yet (the harvest 
time was still to come with thee) upon casual sands 
of Avernus? or art thou enacting Rover (as we 
would gladlier think) by wandering Elysian streams? 

This mortal frame, while thou didst play thy brief 
antics amongst us, was in truth any thing but a 
prison to thee, as the vain Platonist dreams of this 
body to be no better than a county gaol, forsooth, 
or some house of durance vile, whereof the five 
senses are the fetters. Thou knewest better than to 
be in a hurry to cast ofl" those gyves ; and had no- 
tice to quit, I fear, before thou wert quite ready to 
abandon this fleshy tenement. It was thy Pleasure 
House, thy Palace of Dainty Devices ; thy Louvre, 
or thy White Hall. 

What ■ new mysterious lodgings dost thou tenant 
now? or when may we expect thy aerial house- 



warming ? 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 2/ 

Tartarus we know, and we have read of the Blessed 
Shades; now cannot I intelHgibly fancy thee in 
either. 

Is it too much to hazard a conjecture, that (as the 
schoohnen admitted a receptacle apart for Patriarchs 
and un-chrisom Babes) there may exist — not far 
perchance from that storehouse of all vanities, which 
Milton saw in visions — a Limbo somewhere for 
Players? and that 

Up thither like aerial vapours fly 

Both all Stage things, and all that in Stage things 

Built their fond hopes of glory, or lasting fame ? 

All the unaccomplish'd works of Authors' hands, 

Abortive, monstrous, or unkindly mix'd, 

Damn'd upon earth, fleet thither — 

Play, Opera, Farce, with all their trumpery — 

There, by the neighbouring moon (by some not 
improperly supposed thy Regent Planet upon earth) 
mayst thou not still be acting thy managerial pranks, 
great disembodied Lessee? but Lessee still, and still 
a Manager. 

In Green Rooms, impervious to mortal eye, the 
muse beholds the wielding posthumous empire. 

Thin ghosts of Figurantes (never plump on earth) 
circle thee in endlessly, and still their song is Fye on 
sinful Phantasy. 

Magnificent were thy capriccios on this globe of 
earth, Robert William Elliston ! for as yet we 
know not thy new name in heaven. 



28 TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 

It irks me to think, that, stript of thy regalities, 
thou shouldst ferry over, a poor forked shade, in 
crazy Stygian wherry. Methinks I hear the old boat- 
man, paddling by the weedy wharf, with raucid voice, 
bawhng ''Sculls, Sculls:" to which, with waving 
hand, and majestic action, thou deignest no reply, 
other than in two curt monosyllables, '* No : Oars." 

But the laws of Pluto's kingdom know small differ- 
ence between king, and cobbler ; manager, and call- 
boy ; and, if haply your dates of life were contermi- 
nant, you are quietly taking your passage, cheek by 
cheek (O ignoble levelHng of Death) with the shade 
of some recently departed candle- snuffer. 

But mercy ! what strippings, what tearing off of 
histrionic robes, and private vanities ! what denuda- 
tions to the bone, before the surly Ferryman will 
admit you to set a foot within his battered lighter ! 

Crowns, sceptres ; shield, sword, and truncheon ; 
thy own coronation robes (for thou hast brought the 
whole property man's wardrobe with thee, enough 
to sink a navy) ; the judge's ermine ; the coxcomb's 
wig ; the snuff-box a la Foppington — all must over- 
board, he positively swears — and that ancient mar- 
iner brooks no denial ; for, since the tiresome 
monodrame of the old Thracian Harper, Charon, 
it is to be believed, hath shown small taste for 
theatricals. 

Aye, now 'tis done. You are just boat weight; 
pura et puta anima. 



TO THE SHADE OF ELLISTON. 29 

But bless me, how little you look ! 

So shall we all look — kings, and keysars — stript 
for the last voyage. 

But the murky rogue pushes off. Adieu, pleasant, 
and thrice pleasant shade ! with my parting thanks 
for many a heavy hour of Hfe lightened by thy harm- 
less extravaganzas, public or domestic. 

Rhadamanthus, who tries the lighter causes below, 
leaving to his two brethren the heavy calendars — 
honest Rhadamanth, always partial to players, weigh- 
ing their parti-coloured existence here upon earth, — ■ 
making account of the few foibles, that may have 
shaded thy real life, as we call it, (though, substan- 
tially, scarcely less a vapour than thy idlest vagaries 
upon the boards of Drury,) as but of so many 
echoes, natural re-percussions, and results to be ex- 
pected from the assumed extravagancies of thy sec- 
ondary or mock life , nightly upon a stage — after a 
lenient castigation, with rods lighter than of those 
Medusean ringlets, but just enough to "whip the 
offending Adam out of thee " — shall courteously 
dismiss thee at the right hand gate — the o. P. side 
of Hades — that conducts to masques, and merry- 
makings, in the Theatre Royal of Proserpine. 

PLAUDITO, ET VALETO. 



ELLISTONIANA. 



My acquaintance with the pleasant creature, whose 
loss we all deplore, was but slight. 

My first introduction to E., which afterwards 
ripened into an acquaintance a little on this side of 
intimacy, was over a counter of the Leamington Spa 
Library, then newly entered upon by a branch of 
his family. E., whom nothing misbecame — to aus- 
picate, I suppose, the filial concern, and set it a 
going with a lustre — was serving in person two 
damsels fair, who had conie into the shop ostensibly 
to inquire for some new publication, but in reality 
to have a sight of the illustrious shopman, hoping 
some conference. With what an air did he reach 
down the volume, dispassionately giving his opinion 
upon the worth of the work in question, and launch- 
ing out into a dissertation on its comparative merits 
with those of certain publications of a similar stamp, 
its rivals ! his enchanted customers fairly hanging on 
his lips, subdued to their authoritative sentence. So 
have I seen a gentleman in comedy acting the shop- 



ELLISTONIANA. 3 1 

man. So Lovelace sold his gloves in King Street. 
I admired the histrionic art, by which he contrived 
to carry clean away every notion of disgrace, from 
the occupation he had so genqrously submitted to; 
and from that hour I judged him, with no after re- 
pentance, to be a person, with whom it would be a 
felicity to be more acquainted. 

To descant upon his merits as a Comedian would 
be superfluous. With his blended private and pro- 
fessional habits alone I have to do ; that harmonious 
fusion of the manners of the player into those of 
every day life, which brought the stage boards into 
streets, and dining-parlours, and kept up the play 
when the play was ended. — "I like Wrench," a 
friend was saying to him one day, " because he is 
the same natural, easy creature, on the stage, that he 
is off.^^ "My case exactly," retorted Elliston — with 
a charming forgetfulness, that the converse of a 
proposition does not always lead to the same con- 
clusion — "I am the same person off the stage that 
I am ony The inference, at first sight, seems iden- 
tical ; but examine it a little, and it confesses only, 
that the one performer was never, and the other 
always, acting. 

And in truth this was the charm of Elliston' s pri- 
vate deportment. You had a spirited performance 
always going on before your eyes, with nothing to 
pay. As where a monarch takes up his casual abode 



32 ELLISTONIANA. 

for a night, the poorest hovel which he honours by 
his sleeping in it, becomes ipso facto for that time 
a palace ; so wherever EUiston walked, sate, or stood 
still, there was the theatre. He carried about with 
him his pit, boxes, and galleries, and set up his port- 
able playhouse at corners of streets, and in the 
market-places. Upon flintiest pavements he trod the 
boards still; and if his theme chanced to be pas- 
sionate, the green baize carpet of tragedy spontane- 
ously rose beneath his feet. Now this was hearty, 
and showed a love for his art. So Apelles always 
painted — in thought. So G. D. always poetises. 
I hate a lukewarm artist. I have known actors — 
and some of them of Elliston's own stamp — who 
shall have agreeably been amusing you in the part 
of a rake or a coxcomb, through the two or three 
hours of their dramatic existence ; but no sooner 
does the curtain fall with its leaden clatter, but a 
spirit of lead seems to seize on all their faculties. 
They emerge sour, morose persons, intolerable to 
their families, servants, &c. Another shall have been 
expanding your heart with generous deeds and sen- 
timents, till it even beats with yearnings of universal 
sympathy ; you absolutely long to go home, and do 
some good action. The play seems tedious, till you 
can get fairly out of the house, and realize your 
laudable intentions. At length the final bell rings, 
and this cordial representative of all that is amiable 



ELLISTONIANA. 33 

in human breasts steps forth — a miser. ElHston 
was more of a piece. Did he play Ranger? and 
did Ranger fill the general bosom of the town with 
satisfaction? why should he not be Ranger, and dif- 
fuse the same cordial satisfaction among his private 
circles? witli his temperament, his animal spirits, his 
good-nature, his follies perchance, could he do better 
than identify himself with his impersonation? Are 
we to like a pleasant rake, or coxcomb, on the stage, 
and give ourselves airs of aversion for the identical 
character presented to us in actual life? or what 
would the performer have gained by divesting him- 
self of the impersonation? Could the man ElHston 
have been essentially different from his part, even if 
he had avoided to reflect to us studiously, in private 
circles, the airy briskness, the forwardness, and 'scape 
goat trickeries of his prototype ? 

" But there is something not natural in this ever- 
lasting acting ; we want the real man." 

Are you quite sure that it is not the man himself, 
whom you cannot, or will not see, under some adven- 
titious trappings, which, nevertheless, sit not at all 
inconsistently upon him ? What if it is the nature of 
some men to be highly artificial ? The fault is least 
reprehensible in players. Gibber was his own Fop- 
pington, with almost as much wit as Vanburgh could 
add to it. 

*'My conceit of his person," — it is Ben Jonson 

3 



34 ELLISTONIANA. 

speaking of Lord Bacon, — '' was never increased 
towards him by his place or honours. But I have, 
and do reverence him for the greatness, that was 
only proper to himself; in that he seemed to me 
ever one of the greatest men, that had been in many 
ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that heaven 
would give him strength ; for greatness he could not 
want." 

The quality here commended was scarcely less con- 
spicuous in the subject of these idle reminiscences, 
than in my Lord Verulam. Those who have imag- 
ined that an unexpected elevation to the direction 
of a great London Theatre, affected the consequence 
of Elliston, or at all changed his nature, knew not 
the essential greatness of the man whom they dis- 
parage. It was my fortune to encounter him near 
St. Dunstan's Church (which, with its punctual giants, 
is now no more than dust and a shadow) , on the 
morning of his election to that high office. Grasping 
my hand with a look of significance, he only uttered, 
— *' Have you heard the news? " — then with another 
look following up the blow, he subjoined, *^ I am the 
future Manager of Drury Lane Theatre." ^ Breath- 
less as he saw me, he stayed not for congratulation 
or reply, but mutely stalked away, leaving me to 
chew upon his new-blown dignities at leisure. In fact, 
nothing could be said to it. Expressive silence alone 
could muse his praise. This was in his great style. 



ELLISTONIANA. 3 c 

But was he less great, (be witness, O ye Powers of 
Equanimity, that supported in the ruins of Carthage 
the consular exile, and more recently transmuted for 
a more illustrious exile, the barren constableship of 
Elba into an image of Imperial France), when, in 
melancholy after-years, again, much near the same 
spot, I met him, when that sceptre had been wrested 
from his hand, and his dominion was curtailed to 
the petty managership, and part proprietorship, of 
the small Olympic, his Elba ? He still played nightly 
upon the boards of Drury, but in parts alas ! allotted 
to him, not magnificently distributed by him. Waiv- 
ing his great loss as nothing, and magnificently sink- 
ing the sense of fallen material grandeur in the more 
liberal resentment of depreciations done to his more 
lofty /;^/(f//(?^/?<^(3:/ pretensions, "Have you heard" (his 
customary exordium) — "have you heard," said he, 
"how they treat me? they put me m comedy. ''^ 
Thought I — but his finger on his lips forbade any 
verbal interruption — " where could they have put 
you better?" Then, after a pause — "Where I 
formerly played Romeo, I now play Mercutio," -— 
and so again he stalked away, neither staying, nor 
caring for, responses. 

O, it was a rich scene, — but Sir A C , 

the best of story-tellers and surgeons, who mends a 
lame narrative almost as well as he sets a fracture, 
alone could do justice to it — that I was witness to. 



36 ELLISTONIANA. 

in the tarnished room (that had once been green) 
of that same little Olympic. There, after his depo- 
sition from Imperial Drury, he substituted a throne. 
That Olympic Hill was his " highest heaven ; " him- 
self "Jove in his chair." There he sat in state, 
while before him, on complaint of prompter, was 
brought for judgment — how shall I describe her ? — 
one of those little tawdry things that flirt at the tails 
of choruses — a probationer for the town, in either 
of its senses — the pertest little drab — a dirty fringe 
and appendage of the lamps' smoke — who, it seems, 
on some disapprobation expressed by a " highly re- 
spectable " audience, had precipitately quitted her 
station on the boards, and withdrawn her small 
talents in disgust. 

"And how dare you," said her Manager — assum- 
ing a censorial severity which would have crushed 
the confidence of a Vestris, and disarmed that beau- 
tiful Rebel herself of her professional caprices — I 
verily believe, he thought her standing before him — 
" how dare you. Madam, withdraw yourself, without 
a notice, from your theatrical duties?" "I was 
hissed. Sir." " And you have the presumption to 
decide upon the taste of the town? " "I don't know 
that. Sir, but I will never stand to be hissed," was 
the subjoinder of young Confidence — when gather- 
ing up his features into one significant mass of 
wonder, pity, and expostulatory indignation — in a 



ELLISTONIANA. 37 

lesson never to have been lost upon a creature less 
forward than she who stood before him — his words 
were these : " They have hissed me:' 

'Twas the identical argument a fortiori, which the 
son of Peleus uses to Lycaon trembling under his 
lance, to persuade him to take his destiny with a 
good grace. " I too am mortal." And it is to be 
beUeved that in both cases the rhetoric missed of 
its application, for wa^t of a proper understanding 
with the faculties of the respective recipients. 

<' Quite an Opera pit," he said to me, as he was 
courteously conducting me over the benches of his 
Surrey Theatre, the last retreat, and recess, of his 
every-day waning grandeur. 

Those who knew Elliston, will know the manner 
in which he pronounced the latter sentence of the 
few words I am about to record. One proud day to 
me he took his roast mutton with us in the Temple, 
to which I had superadded a preliminary haddock. 
After a rather plentiful partaking of the meagre ban- 
quet, not unrefreshed with the humbler sort of liquors, 
I made a sort of apology for the humility of the 
fare, observing that for my own part I never ate but 
of one dish at dinner. " I too never eat but one 
thing at dinner"— was his reply— then after a 
pause — "reckoning fish as nothing." The manner 
was all. It was as if by one peremptory sentence 
he had decreed the annihilation of all the savory 



38 ELLISTONIANA. 

esculents, which the pleasant and nutritious-food- 
giving Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from 
her watery bosom. This was greatness^ tempered 
with considerate tenderness to the feelings of his 
scanty but welcoming entertainer. 

Great wert thou in thy life, Robert William 
Elliston ! and not lessened in thy death, if report 
speak truly, which says that thou didst direct that 
thy mortal remains should repose under no inscrip- 
tion but one of pure Latinity. Classical was thy 
bringing up ! and beautiful was the feeling on thy 
last bed, which, connecting the man with the boy, 
took thee back in thy latest exercise of imagination, 
to the days when, undreaming of Theatres and 
Managerships, thou wert a scholar, and an early ripe 
one, under the roofs builded by the munificent and 
pious Colet. For thee the Pauline Muses weep. 
In elegies, that shall silence this crude prose, they 
shall celebrate thy praise. 



DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS 
AND READING. 



To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with 
the forced product of another man's brain. Now I think a 
man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the 
natural sprouts of his own. 

Lord Foppington in the Relapse. 



An ingenious acquaintance of my own was so 
much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, 
that he has left off reading altogether, to the great 
improvement of his originality. At the hazard of 
losing some credit on this head, I must confess that 
I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to 
other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in 
others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other 
men's minds. When I am not walking, I am read- 
ing ; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. 

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too 
genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can 
read any thing which I call a book. There are 
things in that shape which I cannot allow for such. 



40 DETACHED THOUGHTS 

In this catalogue of books which are no books — 
biblia a-biblia — I reckon Court Calendars, Direc- 
tories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and 
lettered at the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, 
Statutes at Large ; the works of Hume, Gibbon, 
Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, 
all those volumes which " no gentleman's library 
should be without : " the Histories of Flavins Jose- 
phus (that learned Jew), and Paley's Moral Philos- 
ophy. With these exceptions, I can read almost 
any thing. 1 bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so 
unexcluding. 

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these 
things in books'* clothing perched upon shelves, like 
false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into 
the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. 
To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, 
and hope it some kind-hearted play-book, then, 
opening what " seem its leaves," to come bolt upon 
a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, 
or a Farquhar, and find — Adam Smith. To view 
a well-arranged assortment of blockheaded Encyclo- 
paedias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in 
an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that 
good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shiver- 
ing folios ; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and 
enable old Raymund Lully to look like himself again 
in the world. I never see these impostors, but I 



ON BOOKS AND READING. 41 

long to strip them, to warm my ragged veterans in 
their spoils. 

To be strong-backed and neat-bound is the de- 
sideratum of a volume. Magnificence comes after. 
This, when it can be afforded, is not to be lavished 
upon all kinds of books indiscriminately. I would 
not dress a set of Magazines, for instance, in full 
. suit. The dishabille, or half-binding (with Russia 
backs ever) is our costume. A Shakspeare, or a 
Milton (unless the first editions), it were mere fop- 
pery to trick out in gay apparel. The possession of 
them confers no distinction. The exterior of them 
(the things themselves being so common), strange 
to say, raises no sweet emotions, no tickling sense of 
property in the owner. Thomson's Seasons, again, 
looks best (I maintain it) a little torn, and dog's- 
eared. How beautiful to a genuine lover of reading 
are the sullied leaves, and worn out appearance, nay 
the very odour (beyond Russia,) if we would not for- 
get kind feelings in fastidiousness, of an old " Circu- 
lating Library " Tom Jones, or Vicar of Wakefield ! 
How they speak of the thousand thumbs, that have 
turned over their pages with delight ! — of the lone 
sempstress, whom they may have cheered (milliner, 
or harder-working mantua-maker) after her long 
day's needle-toil, running far into midnight, when 
she has snatched an hour, ill spared from sleep, to 
steep her cares, as in some Lethean cup, in spelling 



43 DETACHED THOUGHTS 

out their enchanting contents ! Who would have 
them a whit less soiled? What better condition 
could we desire to see them in? 

In some respects the better a book is, the less it 
demands from binding. Fielding, Smollet, Sterne, 
and all that class of perpetually self-reproductive 
volumes — Great Nature's Stereotypes — we see them 
individually perish with less regret, because we know 
the copies of them to be " eterne." But where a 
book is at once both good and rare — where the 
individual is almost the species, and when that 
perishes, 

" We know not where is that Pronniethean torch 
That can its light relumhie " — 

such a book, for instance, as the Life of the Duke 
of Newcastle, by his Duchess — no casket is rich 
enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour 
and keep safe such a jewel. 

Not only rare volumes of this description, which 
seem hopeless ever to be reprinted ; but old editions 
of writers, such as Sir Philip Sydney, Bishop Taylor, 
Milton in his prose -works. Fuller — of whom we 
have reprints, yet the books themselves, though they 
go about, and are talked of here and there, we know, 
have not endenizened themselves (nor possibly ever 
will) in the national heart, so as to become stock 
books — it is good to possess these in durable and 



ON BOOKS AND READING. 43 

costly covers, I do not care for a First Folio of 
Shakspeare. I rather prefer the common editions of 
Rowe and Tonson, without notes, and with plates^ 
which, being so execrably bad, serve as maps, or 
modest remembrancers, to the text ; and without 
pretending to any supposable emulation with it, are 
so much better than the Shakspeare gallery e?igj^aV' 
ingSy which did. I have a community of feeling with 
my countrymen about his Plays, and I like those 
editions of him best, which have been oftenest tum- 
bled about and handled. — On the contrary, I can- 
not read Beaumont and Fletcher but in Folio. The 
Octavo editions are painful to look at. I have no 
sympathy with them. If they were as much read as 
the current editions of the other poet, I should pre- 
fer them in that shape to the older one. I do not 
know a more heartless sight than the reprint of the 
Anatomy of Melancholy. What need was there of 
unearthing the bones of that fantastic old great man, 
to expose them in a winding-sheet of the newest 
fashion to modern censure? what hapless stationer 
could dream of Burton ever becoming popular? — 
The wretched Malone could not do worse, when he 
bribed the sexton of Stratford church to let him 
white-wash the painted effigy of old Shakspeare, 
which stood there, in rude but lively fashion de- 
picted, to the very colour of the cheek, the eye, the 
eye-brow, hair, the very dress he used to wear — the 



44 DETACHED THOUGHTS 

only authentic testimony we had, however imperfect, 
of these curious parts and parcels of him. They 
covered him over with a coat of white paint. By 
, if I had been a justice of peace for Warwick- 
shire, I would have clapt both commentator and 
sexton fast in the stocks, for a pair of meddling 
sacrilegious varlets. 

I think I see them at their work — these sapient 
trouble-tombs. 

Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the 
names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have 
a finer relish to the ear — to mine, at least — than 
that of Milton or of Shakspeare ? It may be, that the 
latter are more staled and rung upon in common dis- 
course. The sweetest names, and which carry a 
perfume in the mention, are. Kit Marlowe, Drayton, 
Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley. 

Much depends upon when and where you read a 
book. In the five or six impatient minutes, before 
the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking 
up the Fairy Queen for a stop-gap, or a volume of 
Bishop Andrewes' sermons? 

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music 
to be played before you enter upon him. But he 
brings his music, to which, who listens, had need 
bring docile thoughts, and purged ears. 

Winter evenings — the world shut out — with less 
of ceremony the gentle Shakspeare enters. At such a 
season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale — 



ON BOOKS AND READING. 45 

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud — • 
to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person 
listening. More than one — and it degenerates into 
an audience. 

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, 
are for the eye to ghde over only. It will not do to 
read them out. I could never listen to even the 
better kind of modern novels without extreme irk- 
someness. 

A newspaper, read out, is intolerable. In some of 
the Bank offices it is the custom (to save so much in- 
dividual time) for one of the clerks — who is the best 
scholar — to commence upon the Times, or the 
Chronicle, and recite its entire contents aloud pi'o 
bono publico. With every advantage of lungs and 
elocution, the effect is singularly vapid. In barbers' 
shops and public-houses a fellow will get up, and spell 
out a paragraph, which he communicates as some 
discovery. Another follows with his selection. So 
the entire journal transpires at length by piece-meal. 
Seldom-readers are slow readers, and, without this ex- 
pedient no one in the company would probably ever 
travel through the contents of a whole paper. 

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever 
lays one down without a feeling of disappointment. 

What an eternal time that gentleman in black, at 
Nando's, keeps the paper ! I am sick of hearing the 
waiter bawling out incessantly, "the Chronicle is in 
hand. Sir." 



46 DETACHED THOUGHTS 

Coming in to an inn at night — having ordered 
your supper — - what can be more dehghtful than to 
find lying in the window-seat, left there time out of 
mind by the carelessness of some former guest — two 
or three numbers of the old Town and Country Maga- 
zine, with its amusing tete-a-tete pictures — " The 

Royal Lover and Lady G j" "The Melting 

Platonic and the old Beau," — and such like anti- 
quated scandal ? Would you exchange it — at that 
time, and in that place — for a better book ? 

Poor Tobin, who latterly fell blind, did not regret 
it so much for the weightier kinds of reading — the 
Paradise Lost, or Comus, he could have read to him 
— but he missed the pleasure of skimming over with 
his own eye a magazine, or a light pamphlet. 

I should not care to be caught in the serious 
avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading Can- 
dide. 

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than 
having been once detected — by a familiar damsel — 
reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill 
(her Cythera), reading — Pamela. There was noth- 
ing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at 
the exposure ; but as she seated herself down by me, 
and seemed determined to read in company, I could 
have wished it had been — any other book. We 
read on very sociably for a few pages ; and, not find- 
ing the author much to her taste, she got up, and — 



ON BOOKS AND READING. 47 

went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to con- 
jecture, whether the blush (for there was one between 
us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in 
this dilemma. From me you shall never get the 
secret. 

I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. 
I cannot settle my spirits to it. I knew a Unitarian 
minister, who was generally to be seen upon Snow- 
hill (as yet Skinner' s-street was not), between the 
hours of ten and eleven in the morning, studying a 
volume of Lardner. I own this to have been a strain 
of abstraction beyond my reach. I used to admire 
how he sidled along, keeping clear of secular con- 
tacts. An illiterate encounter with a porter's knot, 
or a bread basket, would have quickly put to flight all 
the theology I am master of, and have left me worse 
than indifferent to the five points. 

There is a class of street- readers, whom I can never 
contemplate without affection — the poor gentry, who, 
not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a 
little learning at the open stalls — the owner, with his 
hard eye, casting envious looks at them all the while, 
and thinking when they will have done. Venturing 
tenderly, page after page, expecting every moment 
when he shall interpose his interdict, and yet unable 
to deny themselves the gratification, they " snatch a 
fearful joy." Martin B — , in this way, by daily frag- 
ments, got through two volumes of Clarissa, when the 



48 DETACHED THOUGHTS. 

stall-keeper damped his laudable ambition, by asking 
him (it was in his younger days) whether he meant 
to purchase the work. M. declares, that under no 
circumstances of his life did he ever peruse a book 
with half the satisfaction which he took in those un- 
easy snatches. A quaint poetess of our day has moral- 
ised upon this subject in two very touching but homely 
stanzas. 

I saw a boy with eager eye 
Open a book upon a stall, 
And read, as he 'd devour it all ; 
Which when the stall-man did espy, 
Soon to the boy I heard him call, 
" You, Sir, you never buy a book. 
Therefore in one you shall not look." 
The boy pass'd slowly on, and with a sigh , 

He wish'd he never had been taught to read, 
Then of the old churl's books he should have had no need. 
Of sufferings the poor have many, 
Which never can the rich annoy : 
I soon perceiv'd another boy, 
Who look'd as if he 'd not had any 
Food, for that day at least — enjoy 
The sight of cold meat in a tavern larder. 
■ This boy's case, then thought I, is surely harder. 
Thus hungry, longing, thus without a penny. 
Beholding choice of dainty-dressed meat : 
No wonder if he wish he ne'er had learn'd to eat. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 



I AM fond of passing my vacations (I believe I have 
said so before) at one or other of the Universities. 
Next to these my choice would fix me at some woody 
spot, such as the neighbourhood of Henley affords in 
abundance, upon the banks of my beloved Thames. 
But somehow or other my cousin contrives to wheedle 
me once in three or four seasons to a watering place. 
Old attachments cling to her in spite of experience. 
We have been dull at Worthing one summer, duller 
at Brighton another, dullest at Eastbourn a third, and 
are at this moment doing dreary penance at — Hast- 
ings ! — and all because we were happy many years 
ago for a brief week at — Margate. That was our 
first sea- side experiment, and many circumstances 
combined to make it the most agreeable holyday of 
my hfe. We had neither of us seen the sea, and we 
had never been from home so long together in 
company. 

Can I forget thee, thou old Margate Hoy, with thy 
weather-beaten, sun-burnt captain, and his rough ac- 

4 



50 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 

commodations — ill exchanged for the foppery and 
fresh-water niceness of the modern steam packet? 
To the winds and waves thou committedst thy goodly 
freightage, and didst ask no aid of magic fumes, and 
spells, and boiling cauldrons. With the gales of 
heaven thou wentest swimmingly ; or, when it was 
their pleasure, stoodest still with sailor-like patience. 
Thy course was natural, not forced, as in a hot-bed ; 
nor didst thou go poisoning the breath of ocean with 
sulphureous smoke — a great sea-chimaera, chimney- 
ing and furnacing the deep ; or liker to that fire-god 
parching up Scamander. 

Can I forget thy honest, yet slender crew, with 
their coy reluctant responses (yet to the suppression 
of anything like contempt) to the raw questions, 
which we of the great city would be ever and anon 
putting to them, as to the uses of this or that strange 
naval implement? 'Specially can I forget thee, thou 
happy medium, thou shade of refuge between us and 
them, conciliating interpreter of their skill to our sim- 
plicity, comfortable ambassador between sea and 
land ! — whose sailor- trowsers did not more convin- 
cingly assure thee to be an adopted denizen of the 
former, than thy white cap, and whiter apron over 
them, with thy neat- fingered practice in thy culinary 
vocation, bespoke thee to have been of inland nurture 
heretofore — a master cook of Eastcheap? How 
busily didst thou ply thy multifarious occupation, 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 51 

cook, mariner, attendant, chamberlain ; here, there, 
like another Ariel, flaming at once about all parts of 
the deck, yet with kindlier ministrations — not to 
assist the tempest, but, as if touched with a kindred 
sense of our infirmities, to soothe the qualms which 
that untried motion might haply raise in our crude 
land-fancies. And when the o'er-washing billows 
drove us below deck (for it was far gone in October, 
and we had stiff and blowing weather) how did thy 
officious ministerings, still catering for our comfort, 
with cards, and cordials, and thy more cordial con- 
versation, alleviate the closeness and the confinement 
of thy else (truth to say) not very savoury, nor very 
inviting little cabin ! 

With these additaments to boot, we had on board 
a fellow-passenger, whose discourse in verity might 
have beguiled a longer voyage than we meditated, 
and have made mirth and wonder abound as far as 
the Azores. He was a dark, Spanish complexioned 
young man, remarkably handsome, with an officer- 
like assurance, and an insuppressible volubility of as- 
sertion. He was, in fact, the greatest liar I had met 
with then, or since. He was none of your hesitating, 
half-story tellers (a most painful description of mor- 
tals) who go on sounding your belief, and only giving 
you as much as they see you can swallow at a time — 
the nibbling pickpockets of your patience — but one 
who committed downright, day- light depredations 



52 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 

upon his neighbour's faith. He did not stand shiver- 
ing upon the brink, but was a hearty thorough-paced 
liar, and pkniged at once into the depths of your 
creduhty. I partly beheve, he made pretty sure of 
his company. Not many rich, not many wise, or 
learned, composed at that time the common stowage 
of a Margate packet. We were, I am afraid, a set of 
as unseasoned Londoners (let our enemies give it a 
worse name) as Aldermanbury, or Watling street, at 
that time of day could have supplied. There might 
be an exception or two among us, but I scorn to make 
any invidious distinctions among such a jolly, com- 
panionable ship's company, as those were whom I 
sailed with. Something too must be conceded to the 
Genius Loci. Had the confident fellow told us half 
the legends on land, which he favoured us with on 
the other element, I flatter myself the good sense of 
most of us would have revolted. But we were in a 
new world, with everything unfamiliar about us, and 
the time and place disposed us to the reception of 
any prodigious marvel whatsoever. Time has obliter- 
ated from my memory much of his wild fablings ; and 
the rest would appear but dull, as written, and to be 
read on shore. He had been Aid-de-camp (among 
other rare accidents and fortunes) to a Persian prince, 
and at one blow had stricken off the head of the 
King of Carimania on horseback. He, of course, 
married the Prince's daughter. I forget what un- 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 53 

lucky turn in the politics of that court, combining 
with the loss of his consort, was the reason of his 
quitting Persia ; but with the rapidity of a magician 
he transported himself, along with his hearers, back 
to England, where we still found him in the confi- 
dence of great ladies. There was some story of a 
Princess — Elizabeth, if I remember — having in- 
trusted to his care an extraordinary casket of jewels, 
upon some extraordinary occasion — but as I am 
not certain of the name or circumstance at this dis- 
tance of time, I must leave it to the Royal daughters 
of England to settle the honour among themselves in 
private. I cannot call to mind half his pleasant won- 
ders ; but I perfectly remember, that in the course 
of his travels he had seen a phoenix ; and he obli- 
gingly undeceived us of the vulgar error, that there is 
but one of that species at a time, assuring us that 
they were not uncommon in some parts of Upper 
Egypt. Hitherto he had found the most implicit 
listeners. His dreaming fancies had transported us 
beyond the '' ignorant present." But when (still 
hardying more and more in his triumphs over our 
simplicity), he went on to affirm that he had actually 
sailed through the legs of the Colossus at Rhodes, it 
really became necessary to make a stand. And here 
I must do justice to the good sense and intrepidity 
of one of our party, a youth, that had hitherto been 
one of his most deferential auditors, who, from his 



54 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 

recent reading, made bold to assure the gentleman, 
that there must be some mistake, as " the Colossus in 
question had been destroyed long since : " to whose 
opinion, delivered with all modesty, our hero was 
obliging enough to concede thus much, that " the 
figure was indeed a little damaged." This was the 
only opposition he met with, and it did not at all 
seem to stagger him, for he proceeded with his fables, 
which the same youth appeared to swallow with still 
more complacency than ever, — confirmed, as it were, 
by the extreme candour of that concession. With 
these prodigies he wheedled us on till we came in 
sight of the Reculvers, which one of our own company 
(having been the voyage before) immediately recog- 
nising, and pointing out to us, was considered by us 
as no ordinary seaman. 

All this time sat upon the edge of the deck quite a 
diiferent character. It was a lad, apparently very 
poor, very infirm, and very patient. His eye was 
ever on the sea, with a smile : and, if he caught now 
and then some snatches of these wild legends, it was 
by accident, and they seemed not to concern him. 
The waves to him whispered more pleasant stories. 
He was as one, being with us, but not of us. He 
heard the bell of dinner ring without stirring; and 
when some of us pulled out our private stores — our 
cold meat and our salads — he produced none, and 
seemed to want none. Only a solitary biscuit he had 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 



55 



laid in ; provision for the one or two days and nights, 
to which these vessels then were oftentimes obhged 
to prolong their voyage. Upon a nearer acquaintance 
with him, which he seemed neither to court nor de- 
cline, we learned that he was going to Margate, with 
the hope of being admitted into the Infirmary there 
for sea-bathing. His disease was a scrofula, which 
appeared to have eaten all over him. He expressed 
great hopes of a cure : and when we asked him, 
whether he had any friends where he was going, he 
rephed, " he had no friends." 

These pleasant, and some mournful passages, with 
the first sight of the sea, co-operating with youth, and 
a sense of holydays, and out-of-door adventure, to 
me that had been pent up in populous cities for 
many months before, — have left upon my mind the 
fragrance as of summer days gone by, bequeathing 
nothing but their remembrance for cold and wintry 
hours to chew upon. 

Will it be thought a digression (it may spare some 
unwelcome comparisons), if I endeavour to account 
for the dissatisfaction which I have heard so many 
persons confess to have felt (as I did myself feel in 
part on this occasion) , at the sight of the sea for the 
first time ? I think the reason usually given — refer- 
ring to the incapacity of actual objects for satisfying 
our preconceptions of them — scarcely goes deep 
enough into the question. Let the same person see 



56 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 

a lion, an elephant, a mountain, for the first time in 
his life, and he shall perhaps feel himself a little morti- 
fied. The things do not fill up that space, which the 
idea of them seemed to take up in his mind. But 
they have still a correspondency to his first notion, 
and in time grow up to it, so as to produce a very 
similar impression : enlarging themselves (if I may 
say so) upon familiarity. But the sea remains a dis- 
appointment. — Is it not, that in the latter we had 
expected to behold (absurdly, I grant, but, I am 
afraid, by the law of imagination unavoidably) not a 
definite object, as those wild beasts, or that mountain 
com passable by the eye, but all the sea at once, the 

COMMENSURATE ANTAGONIST OF THE EARTH ! I do nOt 

say we tell ourselves so much, but the craving of the 
mind is to be satisfied with nothing less. I will sup- 
pose the case of a young person of fifteen (as I then 
was) knowing nothing of the sea, but from descrip- 
tion. He comes to it for the first time — all that he 
has been reading of it all his life, and that the most 
enthusiastic part of life, — all he has gathered from 
narratives of wandering seamen ; what he has gained 
from true voyages, and what he cherishes as credu- 
lously from romance and poetry ; crowding their 
images, and exacting strange tributes from expecta- 
tion. — He thinks of the great deep, and of those 
who go down unto it ; of its thousand isles, and of 
the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 57 

mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without dis- 
turbance, or sense of augmentation ; of Biscay swells, 
and the mariner 

For many a day, and many a dreadful night, 
Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape ; 

of fatal rocks, and the " still-vexed Bermoothes ; " of 
great whirlpools, and the water- spout ; of sunken ships, 
and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring 
depths : of fishes and quaint monsters, to which all 
that is terrible on earth — 

Be but as buggs to frighten babes withal, 
Compared with the creatures in the sea's entral ; 

of naked savages, and Juan Fernandez ; of pearls, and 
shells ; of coral beds, and of enchanted isles ; of mer- 
maids' grots — 

I do not assert that in sober earnest he expects to 
be shown all these wonders at once, but he is under 
the tyranny of a mighty faculty, which haunts him 
with confused hints and shadows of all these ; and 
when the actual object opens first upon him, seen (in 
tame weather too most likely) from our unromantic 
coasts — a speck, a slip of sea- water, as it shows to 
him — what can it prove but a very unsatisfying and 
even diminutive entertainment? Or if he has come 
to it from the mouth of a river, was it much more 
than the river widening? and, even out of sight of 
land, what had he but a flat watery horizon about 



58 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 

him, nothing comparable to the vast o'er- curtaining 
sky, his famiUar object, seen daily without dread or 
amazement ? — Who, in similar circumstances, has 
not been tempted to exclaim with Charoba, in the 
poem of Gebir, — 

Is this the mighty ocean ? — is this all ? 

I love town, or country ; but this detestable Cinque 
Port is neither. I hate these scrubbed shoots, thrust- 
ing out their starved foliage from between the horrid 
fissures of dusty innutritions rocks ; which the ama- 
teur calls " verdure to the edge of the sea." I require 
woods, and they show me stunted coppices. I cry 
out for the water-brooks, and pant for fresh streams, 
and inland murmurs. I cannot stand all day on the 
naked beach, watching the capricious hues of the sea, 
shifting like the colours of a dying mullet. I am 
tired of looking out at the windows of this island- 
prison. I would fain retire into the interior of my 
cage. While I gaze upon the sea, I want to be on it, 
over it, across it. It binds me in with chains, as of 
iron. My thoughts are abroad. I should not so feel 
in Staffordshire. There is no home for me here. 
There is no sense of home at Hastings. It is a place 
of fugitiye resort, an heterogeneous assemblage of sea- 
mews and stock- brokers, Amphitrites of the town, and 
misses that coquet with the Ocean. If it were what 
it was in its primitive shape, and what it ought to 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 59 

have remained, a fair honest fishing-town, and no 
more, it were something — with a few straggling fish- 
ermen's huts scattered about, artless as its cHffs, and 
with their materials filched from them, it were some- 
thing. I could abide to dwell with Meschek; to 
assort with fisher- swains, and smugglers. There are, 
or I dream there are, many of this latter occupation 
here. Their faces become the place. 1 like a smug- 
gler. He is the only honest thief. He robs nothing 
but the revenue, — ^an abstraction I never greatly 
cared about. I could go out with them in their 
mackarel boats, or about their less ostensible busi- 
ness, with some satisfaction. I can even tolerate 
those poor victims to monotony, who from day to 
day pace along the beach, in endless progress and 
recurrence, to watch their illicit countrymen — towns- 
folk or brethren perchance — whistling to the sheath- 
ing and unsheathing of their cutlasses (their only 
solace), who under the mild name of preventive 
service, keep up a legitimated civil warfare in the 
deplorable absence of a foreign one, to show their 
detestation of run hollands, and zeal for old England. 
But it is the visitants from town, that come here to 
say that they have been here, with no more relish of 
the sea than a pond perch, or a dace might be sup- 
posed to have, that are my aversion. I feel like a 
foolish dace in these regions, and have as httle toler- 
ation for myself here, as for them. What can they 



60 THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 

want here? if they had a true reUsh of the ocean, 
why have they brought all this land luggage with 
them? or why pitch their civihsed tents in the desert? 
What mean these scanty book-rooms — marine libra- 
ries as they entitle them — if the sea were, as they 
would have us beheve, a book ^^ to read strange 
matter in?" what are their foolish concert-rooms, if 
they come, as they would fain be thought to do, to 
listen to the music of the waves? All is false and 
hollow pretension. They come, because it is- the 
fashion, and to spoil the nature of the place. They 
are mostly, as I have said, stock-brokers ; but I have 
watched the better sort of them — now and then, an 
honest citizen (of the old stamp) , in the simplicity of 
his heart, shall bring down his wife and daughters, to 
taste the sea breezes. I always know the date of 
their arrival. It is easy to see it in their countenance. 
A day or two they go wandering on the shingles, pick- 
ing up cockle-shells, and thinking them great things ; 
but, in a poor week, imagination slackens : they 
begin to discover that cockles produce no pearls, and 
then — O then ! — if I could interpret for the pretty 
creatures (I know they have not the courage to con- 
fess it themselves) how gladly would they exchange 
their sea-side rambles for a Sunday walk on the green- 
sward of their accustomed Twickenham meadows ! 

I would ask of one of these sea-charmed emigrants, 
who think they truly love the sea, with its wild usages. 



THE OLD MARGATE HOY. 6 1 

what would their feelings be, if some of the unsophis- 
ticated aborigines of this place, encouraged by their 
courteous questionings here, should venture, on the 
faith of such assured sympathy between them, to re- 
turn the visit, and come up to see — London. I must 
imagine them with their fishing-tackle on their back, 
as we carry our town necessaries. What a sensation 
would it cause in Lothbury ? What vehement laughter 
would it not excite among 

The daughters of Cheapside, and wives of Lombard-street. 

I am sure that no town-bred, or inland-born sub- 
jects, can feel their true and natural nourishment at 
these sea-places. Nature, where she does not mean 
us for mariners and vagabonds, bids us stay at home. 
The salt foam seems to nourish a spleen. I am not 
half so good-natured as by the milder waters of my 
natural river. I would exchange these sea-gulls for 
swans, and scud a swallow for ever about the banks of 
Thamesis. 



THE CONVALESCENT. 



A PRETTY severe fit of indisposition which, under 
the name of a nervous fever, has made a prisoner of 
me for some weeks past, and is but slowly leaving me, 
has reduced me to an incapacity of reflecting upon 
any topic foreign to itself. Expect no healthy con- 
clusions from me this month, reader ; I can offer you 
only sick men's dreams. 

And truly the whole state of sickness is such ; for 
what else is it but a magnificent dream for a man to 
lie a- bed, and draw day-light curtains about him ; 
and, shutting out the sun, to induce a total oblivion 
of all the works which are going on under it? To 
become insensible to all the operations of life, except 
the beatings of one feeble pulse ? 

If there be a regal solitude, it is a sick bed. How 
the patient lords it there ! what caprices he acts with- 
out control ! how king-like he sways his pillow — tum- 
bhng, and tossing, and shifting, and lowering, and 
thumping, and flatting, and moulding it, to the ever 
varying requisitions of his throbbing temples. 



THE CONVALESCENT. 63 

He changes sides oftener than a poHtician. Now 
he Hes full length, then half-length, obliquely, trans- 
versely, head and feet quite across the bed ; and 
none accuses him of tergiversation. Within the four 
curtains he is absolute. They are his Mare Clausum. 

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's 
self to himself! he is his own exclusive object. 
Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his 
only duty. 'T is the Two Tables of the Law to him. 
He has nothing to think of but how to get well. 
What passes out of doors, or within them, so he hear 
not the jarring of them, affects him not. 

A little while ago he was greatly concerned in the 
event of a law- suit, which was to be the making or 
the marring of his dearest friend. He was to be seen 
trudging about upon this man's errand to fifty quarters 
of the town at once, jogging this witness, refreshing 
that solicitor. The cause was to come on yesterday. 
He is absolutely as indifferent to the decision, as if it 
were a question to be tried at Pekin. Peradventure 
from some whispering, going on about the house, not 
intended for his hearing, he picks up enough to make 
him understand, that things went cross-grained in 
the Court yesterday, and his friend is ruined. But 
the word ^'friend," and the word ^'ruin," disturb him 
no more than so much jargon. He is not to think of 
any thing but how to get better. 

What a world of foreign cares are merged in that 
absorbing consideration ! 



64 THE CONVALESCENT. 

He has put on the strong armour of sickness, he is 
wrapped in the callous hide of suffering; he keeps 
his sympathy, like some curious vintage, under trusty 
lock and key, for his own use only. 

He lies pitying himself, honing and moaning to 
himself; he yearneth over himself; his bowels are 
even melted within him, to think what he suffers ; he 
is not ashamed to weep over himself. 

He is for ever plotting how to do some good to 
himself; studying little stratagems and artificial alle- 
viations. 

He makes the most of himself; dividing himself, 
by an allowable fiction, into as many distinct indi- 
viduals, as he hath sore and sorrowing members. 
Sometimes he meditates — as of a thing apart from 
him — upon his poor aching head, and that dull pain 
which, dozing or waking, lay in it all the past night 
like a log, or palpable substance of pain, not to be 
removed without opening the very scull, as it seemed, 
to take it thence. Or he pities his long, clammy, at- 
tenuated fingers. He compassionates himself all over ; 
and his bed is a very discipline of humanity, and 
tender heart. 

He is his own sympathiser ; and instinctively feels 
that none can so well perform that ofhce for him. 
He cares for few spectators to his tragedy. Only 
that punctual face of the old nurse pleases him, that 
announces his broths, and his cordials. He likes it 



THE CONVALESCENT. 65 

because it is so unmoved, and because he can pour 
forth his feverish ejaculations before it as unreservedly 
as to his bed-post. 

To the world's business he is dead. He under- 
stands not what the callings and occupations of 
mortals are ; only he has a glimmering conceit of 
some such thing, when the doctor makes his daily 
call : and even in the lines of that busy face he reads 
no multiplicity of patients, but solely conceives of 
himself as the sick man. To what other uneasy 
couch the good man is hastening, when he slips out 
of his chamber, folding up his thin douceur so care- 
fully for fear of rustling — is no speculation which 
he can at present entertain. He thinks only of the 
regular return of the same phenomenon at the same 
hour to-morrow. 

Household rumours touch him not. Some faint 
murmur, indicative of life going on within the house, 
soothes him, while he knows not distinctly what it is. 
He is not to know any thing, not to think of any 
thing. Servants gliding up or down the distant stair- 
case, treading as upon velvet, gently keep his ear 
awake, so long as he troubles not himself further 
than with some feeble guess at their errands. Ex- 
acter knowledge would be a burthen to him : he can 
just endure the pressure of conjecture. He opens 
his eye faintly at the dull stroke of the muffled 
knocker, and closes it again without asking " who 

5 



66 THE CONVALESCENT. 

was it ? " He is flattered by a general notion that 
inquiries are making after him, but he cares not to 
know the name of the inquirer. In the general 
stillness, and awful hush of the house, he lies in 
state, and feels his sovereignty. 

To be sick is to enjoy monarchal prerogatives. 
Compare the silent tread, and quiet ministry, almost 
by the eye only, with which he is served — with the 
careless demeanour, the unceremonious goings in and 
out (slapping of doors, or leaving them open) of the 
very same attendants, when he is getting a little 
better — and you will confess, that from the bed of 
sickness (throne let me rather call it) to the elbow 
chair of convalescence, is a fall from dignity, amount- 
ing to a deposition. 

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his 
pristine stature ! where is now the space, which he 
occupied so lately, in his own, in the family's eye? 
The scene of his regalities, his sick room, which 
was his presence chamber, where he lay and acted 
his despotic fancies — how is it reduced to a com- 
mon bed-room ! The trimness of the very bed has 
something petty and unmeaning about it. It is 
made every day. How unlike to that wavy, many- 
furrowed, oceanic surface, which it presented so short 
a time since, when to make it was a service not to 
be thought of at oftener than three or four day 
revolutions, when the patient was with pain and 



THE CONVALESCENT. 6/ 

grief to be lifted for a little while out of it, to submit to 
the encroachments of unwelcome neatness, and de- 
cencies which his shaken frame deprecated ; then 
to be lifted into it again, for another three or four 
days* respite, to flounder it out of shape again, while 
every fresh furrow was a historical record of some 
shifting posture, some uneasy turning, some seeking 
for a little ease ; and the shrunken skin scarce told 
a truer story than the crumpled coverlid. 

Hushed are those mysterious sighs — those groans 

— so much more awful, while we knew not from 
what caverns of vast hidden suffering they proceeded. 
The Lernean pangs are quenched. The riddle of 
sickness is solved ; and Philoctetes is become an 
ordinary personage. 

Perhaps some relic of the sick man's dream of 
greatness survives in the still lingering visitations of 
the medical attendant. But how is he too changed 
with every thing else ! Can this be he — this man 
of news — of chat — of anecdote — of every thing 
but physic — can this be he, who. so lately came be- 
tween the patient and his cruel enemy, as on some 
solemn embassy from Nature, erecting herself into 
a high mediating party? — Pshaw! 'tis some old 
woman. 

Farewell with him all that made sickness pompous 

— the spell that hushed the household — the desart- 
like stillness, felt throughout its inmost chambers — 



68 THE CONVALESCENT. 

the mute attendance — the inquiry by looks — the 
still softer delicacies of self-attention — the sole and 
single eye of distemper alonely fixed upon itself — 
world-thoughts excluded — the man a world unto 
himself — his own theatre — 

What a speck is he dwindled into ! 

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the 
ebb of sickness, yet far enough from the terra firma 
of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached 
me, requesting — an article. In Articulo Mortis, 
thought I ; but it is something hard — and the 
quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me. The sum- 
mons, unseasonable as it appeared, seemed to link 
me on again to the petty businesses of life, which I 
had lost sight of; a gentle call to activity, however 
trivial ; a wholesome weaning from that preposterous 
dream of self-absorption — the puffy state of sick- 
ness — in which I confess to have lain so long, in- 
sensible to the magazines and monarchies, of the 
world alike ; to its laws, and to its literature. The 
hypochondriac flatus is subsiding ; the acres, which 
in imagination I had spread over — for the sick man 
swells in the sole contemplation of his single suffer- 
ings, tin he becomes a Tityus to himself — are wast- 
ing to a span ; and for the giant of self-importance, 
which I was so lately, you have me once again in 
my natural pretensions — the lean and meagre figure 
of your insignificant Essayist. 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 



So far from the position holding true, that great 
wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking), 
has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest 
wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the 
sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to 
conceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of 
wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be 
understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance 
of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportionate 
straining or excess of any one of them. " So strong 
a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend, 

" did Nature to him frame, 

As all things but his judgment overcame, 

His judgment like the heavenly moon did show, 

Tempering that mighty sea below." 

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in 
the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of 
exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their 



70 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 

own experience, besides the spurious resemblance 
of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreami- 
ness and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams 
being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, 
but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden 
he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends 
the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He 
treads the burning marl without dismay ; he wins 
his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos 
" and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that 
severer chaos of a ^' human mind untuned," he is 
content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate man- 
kind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is 
that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, 
but that, — never letting the reins of reason wholly 
go, while most he seems to do so, — he has his better 
genius still whispering at his ear, with the good ser- 
vant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the 
honest steward Flavins recommending kindlier reso- 
lutions. Where he seems most to recede from hu- 
manity, he will be found the truest to it. From 
beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible 
existences, he subjugates them to the law of her con- 
sistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign 
directress, even when he appears most to betray and 
desert her. His ideal tribes submit to policy ; his 
very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that 
wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus. He tames, 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 71 

and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and 
blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian 
Islanders forced to submit to European vesture. 
Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their 
own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, 
Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the 
little wits are differenced ; that if the latter wander 
ever so little from nature or actual existence, they 
lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms 
are lawless ; their visions nightmares. They do not 
create, which implies shaping and consistency. Their 
imaginations are not active — for to be active is to 
call something into act and form — but passive, as 
men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or some- 
thing super-added to what we know of nature, they 
give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were 
all, and that these mental hallucinations were dis- 
coverable only in the treatment of subjects out of 
nature, or transcending it, the judgment might with 
some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little 
wantonized : but even in the describing of real and 
every day life, that which is before their eyes, one 
of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature 
— show more of that inconsequence, which has a 
natural alliance with frenzy, — than a great genius 
in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls 
them. We appeal to any one that is acquainted 
with the common run of Lane's novels, — as tliey 



72 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 

existed some twenty or thirty years back, — those 
scanty intellectual viands of the whole female read- 
ing public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled 
for ever the innutritious phantoms, — whether he has 
not found his brain more " betossed," his memory 
more puzzled, his sense of when and where more 
confounded, among the improbable events, the in- 
coherent incidents, the inconsistent characters, or 
no- characters, of some third-rate love intrigue — 
where the persons shall be a Lord Glendamour and 
a Miss Rivers, and the scene only alternate between 
Bath and Bond-street — a more bewildering dreami- 
ness induced upon him, than he has felt wandering 
over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the pro- 
ductions we refer to, nothing but names and places 
is familiar ; the persons are neither of this world nor 
of any other conceivable one ; an endless string of 
activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of 
motive : — we meet phantoms in our known walks ; 
fantasques only christened. In the poet we have 
names which announce fiction ; and we have abso- 
lutely no place at all, for the things and persons of 
the Fairy Queen prate not of their " whereabout." 
But in their inner nature, and the law of their speech 
and actions, we are at home and upon acquainted 
ground. " The one turns life into a dream ; the other 
to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every 
day occurrences. By what subtile art of tracing the 



SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 73 

mental processes it is effected, we are not philoso- 
phers enough to explain, but in that wonderful epi- 
sode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money 
God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is 
then a worker of metals, and becomes the god of all 
the treasures of the world ; and has a daughter. 
Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for fa- 
vours — with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tan- 
talus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not 
impertinently, in the same stream — that we should 
be at one moment in the cave of an old hoarder of 
treasures, at the next at the forge of the Cyclops, 
in a palace and yet in hell, all at once, with the 
shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and 
our judgment yet all the time awake, and neither 
able nor willing to detect the fallacy, — is a proof of 
that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his 
widest seeming-aberrations. 

It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a 
copy of the mind's conceptions in sleep ; it is, in 
some sort — but what a copy ! Let the most ro- 
mantic of us, that has been entertained all night 
with the spectacle of some wild and magnificent 
vision, recombine it in the morning, and try it by 
his waking judgment. That which appeared so shift- 
ing, and yet so coherent, while that faculty was pas- 
sive, when it comes under cool examination, shall 
appear so reasonless and so unlinked, that we are 



74 SANITY OF TRUE GENIUS. 

ashamed to have been so deluded ; and to have 
taken, though but in sleep, a monster for a god. 
But the transitions in this episode are every whit as 
violent as in the most extravagant dream, and yet 
the waking judgment ratifies them. 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 



Among the deaths in our obituary for this month, I 
observe with concern "At his cottage on the Bath 
road, Captain Jackson." The name and attribution 
are common enough; but a feeling Hke reproach 
persuades me, that this could have been no other in 
fact than my dear old friend, who some five-and- 
twenty years ago rented a tenement, which he was 
pleased to dignify with the appellation here used, 
about a mile from Westbourn Green. Alack, how 
good men, and the good turns they do us, slide out 
of memory, and are recalled but by the surprise of 
some such sad memento as that which now lies 
before us ! 

He whom I mean was a retired half-pay officer, 
with a wife and two grown-up daughters, whom he 
maintained with the port and notions of gentle- 
women upon that slender professional allowance. 
Comely girls they were too. 

And was I in danger of forgetting this man? — 
his cheerful suppers — the noble tone of hospitality. 



']6 CAPTAIN JACKSON. 

when first you set your foot in the cottage — the 
anxious ministerings about you, where httle or noth- 
ing (God knows) was to be ministered. — Althea's 
horn in a poor platter — the power of self-enchant- 
ment, by which, in his magnificent wishes to enter- 
tain you, he multiplied his means to bounties. 

You saw with your bodily eyes indeed what seemed 
a bare scrag — cold savings from the foregone meal — 
remnant hardly sufficient to send a mendicant from 
the door contented. But in the copious will — the 
revelling imagination of your host — the " mind, the 
mind, Master Shallow," whole beeves were spread 
before you — hecatombs — no end appeared to the 
profusion. 

It was the widow's cruse — the loaves and fishes ; 
carving could not lessen nor helping diminish it — 
the stamina were left — the elemental bone still 
flourished, divested of its accidents. 

" Let us live while we can," methinks I hear the 
open-handed creature exclaim ; " while we have, let 
us not want," "here is plenty left;" "want for 
nothing" — with many more such hospitable sayings, 
the spurs of appetite, and old concomitants of smoak- 
ing boards, and feast-oppressed chargers. Then 
sliding a slender ratio of Single Gloucester upon his 
wife's plate, or the daughter's, he would convey the 
remnant rind into his own, with a merry quirk of 
" the nearer the bone," &c., and declaring that he 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. >jy 

universally preferred the outside. For we had our 
table distinctions, you are to know, and some of us 
in a manner sate above the salt. None but his 
guest or guests dreamed of tasting flesh luxuries at 
night, the fragments were vere hospitibiis sacra. But 
of one thing or another there was always enough, 
and leavings : only he would sometimes finish the 
remainder crust, to show that he wished no savings. 

Wine we had none ; nor, except on very rare oc- 
casions, spirits ; but the sensation of wine was there. 
Some thin kind of ale I remember — " British bev- 
erage," he would say! "Push about, my boys;" 
" Drink to your sweethearts, girls." At every meagre 
draught a toast must ensue, or a song. All the forms 
of good liquor were there, with none of the effects 
wanting. Shut your eyes, and you would swear a 
capacious bowl of punch was foaming in the centre, 
with beams of generous Port or Madeira radiating to 
it from each of the table corners. You got flustered, 
without knowing whence ; tipsy upon words ; and 
reeled under the potency of his unperforming Bac- 
chanalian encouragements. 

We had our songs — '^ Why, Soldiers, Why " — 
and the "British Grenadiers" — in which last we 
were all obliged to bear chorus. Both the daughters 
sang. Their proficiency was a nightly theme — the 
masters he had given them — the "no-expence" 
which he spared to accomplish them in a science 



^8 CAPTAIN JACKSON. 

^'so necessary to young women." But then — they 
could not sing " without the instrument." 

Sacred, and by me^ never-to-be violated, Secrets 
of Poverty ! Should I disclose your honest aims at 
grandeur, your makeshift efforts of magnificence? 
Sleep, sleep, with all thy broken keys, if one of the 
bunch be extant ; thrummed by a thousand ances- 
tral thumbs ; dear, cracked spinnet of dearer Louisa ! 
Without mention of mine, be dumb, thou thin ac- 
companier of her thinner warble ! A veil be spread 
over the dear delighted face of the well-deluded 
father, who now haply listening to cherubic notes, 
scarce feels sincerer pleasure than when she awak- 
ened thy time-shaken chords responsive to the twit- 
terings of that slender image of a voice. 

We were not without our literary talk either. It 
did not extend far, but as far as it went, it was good. 
It was bottomed well ; had good grounds to go upon. 
In /ke cottage was a room, which tradition authenti- 
cated to have been the same in which Glover, in his 
occasional retirements, had penned the greater part 
of his Leonidas. This circumstance was nightly 
quoted, though none of the present inmates, that I 
could discover, appeared ever to have met with the 
poem in. question. But that was no matter. Glover 
had written there, and the anecdote was pressed into 
the account of the family importance. It diffused 
a learned air through the apartment, the little side 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 79 

casement of which (the poet's study window), open- 
ing upon a superb view as far as to the pretty spire 
of Harrow, over domains and patrimonial acres, not 
a rood nor square yard whereof our host could call 
his own, yet gave occasion to an immoderate expan- 
sion of — vanity shall I call it? — in his bosom, as 
he showed them in a glowing summer evening. It 
was all his, he took it all in, and communicated 
rich portions of it to his guests. It was a part 
of his largess, his . hospitality ; it was going over 
his grounds ; he was lord for the time of showing 
them, and you the implicit lookers-up to his mag- 
nificence. 

He was a juggler, who threw mists before your 
eyes — you had no time to detect his fallacies. He 
would say "hand me the silver sugar tongs;" and, 
before you could discover it was a single spoon, and 
that//<^/<?^, he would disturb and captivate your im- 
agination by a misnomer of "the urn" for a tea 
kettle ; or by calling a homely bench a sofa. Rich 
men direct you to their furniture, poor ones divert 
you from it ; he neither did one nor the other, but 
by simply assuming that everything was handsome 
about him, you were positively at a demur what you 
did, or did not see, at the cottage. With nothing to 
live on, he seemed to live on everything. He had 
a stock of wealth in his mind ; not that which is 
properly termed Content, for in truth he was not to 



80 CAPTAIN JACKSON, 

be contained at all, but overflowed all bounds by the 
force of a magnificent self-delusion. 

Enthusiasm is catching ; and even his wife, a sober 
native of North Britain, who generally saw things 
more as they were, was not proof against the con- 
tinual collision of his credulity. Her daughters were 
rational and discreet young women ; in the main, 
perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. 
I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. 
But such was the preponderating opulence of his 
fancy, that I am persuaded, not for any half hour 
together, did they ever look their own prospects 
fairly in the face. There was no resisting the vortex 
of his temperament. His riotous imagination con- 
jured up handsome settlements before their eyes, 
which kept them up in the eye of the world too, 
and seem at last to have realised themselves ; for 
they both have married since, I am told, more 
than respectably. 

It is long since, and my memory waxes dim on 
some subjects, or I should wish to convey some 
notion of the manner in which the pleasant creature 
described the circumstances of his own wedding- 
day. I faintly remember something of a chaise and 
four, in- which he made his entry into Glasgow on 
that morning to fetch the bride home, or carry her 
thither, I forget which. It so completely made out 
the stanza of the old ballad — - 



CAPTAIN JACKSON. 8 1 

When we came down through Glasgow town, 

We were a comely sight to see ; 
My love was clad in black velvet, 

And I myself in cramasie. 

I suppose it was the only occasion, upon which his 
own actual splendour at all corresponded with the 
world's notions on that subject. In homely cart, or 
travelling caravan, by whatever humble vehicle they 
chanced to be transported in less prosperous days, 
the ride through Glasgow came back upon his fancy, 
not as a humiliating contrast, but as a fair occasion 
for reverting to that one day's state. It seemed an 
" equipage etern " from which no power of fate or 
fortune, once mounted, had power thereafter to 
dislodge him. 

There is some merit in putting a handsome face 
upon indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger 
away the sense of them before strangers, may not 
be always discommendable. Tibbs, and Bobadil, 
even when detected, have more of our admiration 
than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat 
upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, 
steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself 
all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of con- 
stitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, 
which was reserved for my old friend Captain 
Jackson. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 



Sera tamen respexit 
Libertas. ViRGlL. 

A Clerk I was in London gay. 

O'Keefe. 



If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to 
waste the golden years of thy life — thy shining 
youth — in the irksome confinement of an office ; to 
have thy prison days prolonged through middle age 
down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope 
of release or respite ; to have lived to forget that 
there are such things as holidays, or to remember 
them but as the prerogatives of childhood ; then, 
and then only, will you be able to appreciate my 
deliverance. 

It is now six and thirty years since I took my seat 
at the desk in Mincing-lane. Melancholy was the 
transition at fourteen from the abundant play-time, 
and the frequently-intervening vacations of school 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 83 

days, to the eight, nine, and sometimes ten hours' 
a-day attendance at a counting house. But time 
partially reconciles us to anything. I gradually be- 
came content — doggedly contented, as wild ani- 
mals in cages. 

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sun- 
days, admirable as the institution of them is for pur- 
poses of worship, are for that very reason the very 
worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. 
In particular, there is a gloom for me attendant 
upon a city Sunday, a weight in the air. I miss the 
cheerful cries of London, the music, and the ballad- 
singers — the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. 
Those eternal bells depress me. The closed shops 
repel me. Prints, pictures, all the glittering and 
endless succession of knacks and gewgaws, and os- 
tentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which 
make a week-day saunter through the less busy 
parts of the metropohs so dehghtful — are shut out. 
No book-stalls deliciously to idle over — No busy 
faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates 
them ever passing by — the very face of business a 
charm by contrast to his temporary relaxation from 
it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances 
— or half-happy at best — of emancipated 'pren- 
tices and little tradesfolks, with here and there a 
servant maid that has got leave to go out, who, slav- 
ing all the week, with the habit has lost almost the 



84 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

capacity of enjoying a free hour; and livelily ex- 
pressing the hoUowness of a day's pleasuring. The 
very strollers in the fields on that day look anything 
but comfortable. 

But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a 
day at Christmas, with a full week in the summer to 
go and air myself in my native fields of Hertford- 
shire. This last was a great indulgence ; and the 
prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me 
up through the year, and made my durance toler- 
able. But when the week came round, did the 
glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with 
me? or rather was it not a series of seven uneasy 
days, spent in restless pursuit of pleasure, and a 
wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the 
most of them? Where was the quiet, where the 
promised rest? Before I had a taste of it, it was 
vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon 
the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene be- 
fore such another snatch would come. Still the 
prospect of its coming threw something of an illu- 
mination upon the darker side of my captivity. 
Without it, as I have said, I could scarcely have 
sustained my thraldom. 

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have 
ever been haunted with a sense (perhaps a mere 
caprice) of incapacity for business. This, during 
my latter years, had increased to such a degree, that 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 85 

it was visible in all the lines of my countenance. 
My health and my good spirits flagged. I had per- 
petually a dread of some crisis, to which I should 
be found unequal. Besides my daylight servitude, 
I served over again all night in my sleep, and would 
awake with terrors of imaginary false entries, errors 
in my accounts, and the like. I was fifty years of 
age, and no prospect of emancipation presented 
itself. I had grown to my desk, as it were ; and 
the wood had entered into my soul. 

My fellows in the office would sometimes rally me 
upon the trouble legible in my countenance ; but I 
did not know that it had raised the suspicions of any 
of my employers, when, on the 5 th of last month, a 

day ever to be remembered by me, L , the junior 

partner in the firm, calling me on one side, directly 
taxed me with my bad looks, and frankly inquired 
the cause of them. So taxed, I honestly made con- 
fession of my infirmity, and added that I was afraid 
I should eventually be obliged to resign his service. 
He spoke some words of course to hearten me, and 
there the matter rested. A whole week I remained 
labouring under the impression that I had acted im- 
prudently in my disclosure ; that I had foolishly 
given a handle against myself, and had been antici- 
pating my own dismissal. A week passed in this 
manner, the most anxious one, I verily believe, in 
my whole hfe, when on the evening of the 12th of 



S6 TPIE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

April, just as I was about quitting my desk to go 
home (it might be about eight o'clock) I received 
an awful summons to attend the presence of the 
whole assembled firm in the formidable back par- 
lour. I thought, now my time is surely come, I 
have done for myself, I am going to be told that 

they have no longer occasion for me. L , I 

could see, smiled at the terror I was in, which was 
a little relief to me, — when to my utter astonish- 
ment B — — , the eldest partner, began a formal 
harangue to me on the length of my services, my 
very meritorious conduct during the whole of the 
time (the deuce, thought I, how did he find out 
that? I protest I never had the confidence to think 
as much). He went on to descant on the expedi- 
ency of retiring at a certain time of life (how my 
heart panted !) and asking me a few questions as 
to the amount of my own property, of which 1 have 
a little, ended with a proposal, to which his three 
partners nodded a grave assent, that I should ac- 
cept from the house, which I had served so well, a 
pension for life to the amount of two- thirds of my 
accustomed salary — - a magnificent offer ! I do not 
know what I answered between surprise and grati- 
tude, but it was understood that I accepted their 
proposal, and I was told that I was free from that 
hour to leave their service. I stammered out a bow, 
and at just ten minutes after eight I went home — 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 87 

for ever. This noble benefit — gratitude forbids me 
to conceal their names — I owe to the kindness of 
the most munificent firm in the world — the house 
of Boldero, Merryweather, Bosanquet, and Lacy. 

Esto perpetua ! 

For the first day or two I felt stunned, over- 
whelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I 
was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered 
about, thinking I was happy, and knowing that I was 
not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old 
Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confine- 
ment. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It 
was like passing out of Time into Eternity — for it is 
a sort of Eternity for a man to have his Time all to 
himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on 
my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor 
man, poor in Time, I was suddenly hfted up into a vast 
revenue ; I could see no end of my possessions ; I 
wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage 
my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution 
persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor 
without weighing their own resources, to forego their 
customary employment all at once, for there may be 
danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my 
resources are sufficient ; and now that those first giddy 
raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling 
of the blessedness of my condition. I am in no 



88 THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 

hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had 

none. If Time hung heavy upon me, I could walk it 

away ; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do 

in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to 

make the most of them. If Time were troublesome, 

I could read it away, but I do not read in that violent 

measure, with which, having no Time my own but 

candle-light Time, I used to weary out my head and 

eye-sight in by-gone winters. I walk, read or scribble 

(as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer 

hunt after pleasure ; I let it come to me. I am like 

the man 

That's born, and has his years come to him, 

In some green desart. 

*^ Years," you will say ! " what is this superannuated 
simpleton calculating upon ! He has already told us, 
he is past fifty." 

I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but de- 
duct out of them the hours which I have lived to other 
people, and not to myself, and you will find me still 
a young fellow. For thcit is the only true Time, which 
a man can properly call his own, that which he has all 
to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be 
said to live it, is other people's time, not his. The 
remnant of my poor days, long or short, is at least 
multiplied for me three-fold. My ten next years, if 
I stretch so far, will be as long as any preceding 
thirty. 'T is a fair rule-of-three sum. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 89 

Among the strange fantasies which beset me at the 
commencement of my freedom, and of which all 
traces are not yet gone, one was, that a vast tract of 
time had intervened since I quitted the Counting 
House. I could not conceive of it as an affair of 
yesterday. The partners, and the clerks, with whom 
1 had for so many years, and for so many hours in 
each day of the year, been closely associated — being 
suddenly removed from them — they seemed as dead 
to me. There is a fine passage, which may serve to 
illustrate this fancy, in a Tragedy by Sir Robert 
Howard, speaking of a friend's death : 

'T was but just now he went away ; 



I have not since had time to shed a tear ; 
And yet the distance does the same appear 
As if he had been a thousand years from me. 
Time takes no measure in Eternity. 

To dissipate this awkward feeling, I have been fain 
to go among them once or twice since ; to visit my 
old desk- fellows — my co-brethren of the quill — 
that I had left below in the state militant. Not all 
the kindness with which they received me could quite 
restore to me that pleasant famiharity, which I had 
heretofore enjoyed among them. We cracked some 
of our old jokes, but methought they went off but 
faintly. My old desk ; the peg where I hung my hat, 
were appropriated to another. I knew it must be, 
but I could not take it kindly, D— — I take me, if 



90 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 



I did not feel some remorse — beast, if I had not, — 
at quitting my old compeers, the faithful partners of 
my toils for six and thirty years, that smoothed for 
me with their jokes and conundrums the ruggedness 
of my professional road. Had it been so rugged then 
after all ? or was I a coward simply ? Well, it is too 
late to repent ; and I also know, that these sugges- 
tions are a common fallacy of the mind on such oc- 
casions. But my heart smote me. I had violently 
broken the bands betwixt us. It was at least not 
courteous. I shallbe some time before I get quite 
reconciled to the separation. Farewell, old cronies, 
yet not for long, for again and again I will come 
among ye, if I shall have your leave. Farewell 

Ch , dry, sarcastic, and friendly ! Do , 

mild, slow to move, and gentlemanly! PI -, 



officious to do, and to volunteer, good services ! — 
and thou, thou dreary pile, fit mansion for a Gresham 
or a Whittington of old, stately House of Merchants ; 
with thy labyrinthine passages, and light-excluding, 
pent-up offices, where candles for one half the year 
supplied the place of the sun's light ; unhealthy 
contributor to my weal, stern fosterer of my living, 
farewell ! In thee remain, and not in the obscure 
collection of some wandering bookseller, my '^ works ! " 
There let them rest, as I do from my labours, piled 
on thy massy shelves, more MSS. in foho than ever 
Aquinas left, and full as useful ! My mantle I be- 
queath among ye. 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 91 

A fortnight has passed since the date of my first 
communication. At that period I was approaching 
to tranquilhty, but had not reached it. I boasted of 
a cahii indeed, but it was comparative only. Some- 
thing of the first flutter was left ; an unsettling sense 
of novelty ; the dazzle to weak eyes of unaccustomed 
light. I missed my old chains, forsooth, as if they 
had been some necessary part of my apparel. I was a 
poor Carthusian, from strict cellular discipline suddenly 
by some revolution returned upon the world. I am 
now as if I had never been other than my own master. 
It is natural to me to go where I please, to do what I 
please. I find myself at eleven o'clock in the day in 
Bond-street, and it seems to me that I have been 
sauntering there at that very hour for years past. I 
digress into Soho, to explore a book-stall. Methinks 
I have been thirty years a collector. There is noth- 
ing strange nor new in it. I find myself before a fine 
picture in a morning. Was it ever otherwise ? What 
is become of Fish-street Hill? Where is Fenchurch- 
street? Stones of old Mincing-lane which I have 
worn with my daily pilgrimage for six and thirty 
years, to the footsteps of what toil-worn clerk are 
your everlasting flints now vocal ? I indent the gayer 
flags of Pall Mall. It is Change time, and I am 
strangely among the Elgin marbles. It was no hyper- 
bole when I ventured to compare the change in my 
condition to a passing into another world. Time 



92 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 



stands still in a manner to me. I have lost all dis- 
tinction of season. I do not know the day of the 
week, or of the month. Each day used to be indi- 
vidually felt by me in its reference to the foreign post 
days ; in its distance from, or propinquity to, the 
next Sunday. I had my Wednesday feelings, my 
Saturday nights' sensations. The genius of each day 
was upon me distinctly during the whole of it, affect- 
ing my appetite, spirits, &c. The phantom of the 
next day, with the dreary five to follow, sate as a load 
upon my poor Sabbath recreations. What charm has 
washed that Ethiop white ? What is gone of Black 
Monday? All days are the same. Sunday itself — 
that unfortunate failure of a holyday as it too often 
proved, what with my sense of its fugitiveness, and 
over-care to get the greatest quantity of pleasure out 
of it — is melted down into a week day. I can spare 
to go to church now, without grudging the huge 
cantle which it used to seem to cut out of the holy- 
day. I have Time for everything. I can visit a sick 
friend. I can interrupt the man of much occupation 
when he is busiest. I can insult over him with an. 
invitation to take a day's pleasure with me to Windsor 
this fine May-morning. It is Lucretian pleasure to 
behold the poor drudges, whom I have left behind in 
the world, carking and caring ; like horses in a mill, 
drudging on in the same eternal round — and what is 
it all for? A man can never have too much Time to 



THE SUPERANNUATED MAN. 93 

himself, nor too little to do. Had I a little son, I 
would christen him Nothing-to-do ; he should do 
nothing. Man, I verily believe, is out of his element 
as long as he is operative. I am altogether for the 
life contemplative. Will no kindly earthquake come 
and swallow up those accursed cotton mills? Take 
me that lumber of a desk there, and bowl it down 

As low as to the fiends. 

I am no longer ***** *^ clerk to the Firm 
of &c. I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with 
in trim gardens. I am already come to be known 
by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating 
at no fixed pace, nor with any settled purpose. I 
walk about ; not to and from. They tell me, a cer- 
tain mm dignifate air, that has been buried so long 
with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in 
my person. I grow into gentihty perceptibly. When 
I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the 
opera. Opus operatum est I have done all that I 
came into this world to do. I have worked task work, 
and have the rest of the day to myself. 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 



It is an ordinary criticism, that my Lord Shaftesbury, 
and Sir WilHam Temple, are models of the genteel 
style in writing. We should prefer saying — of the 
lordly, and the gentlemanly. Nothing can be more 
unlike than the inflated finical rhapsodies of Shaftes- 
bury, and the plain natural chit-chat of Temple. The 
man of rank is discernible in both writers ; but in the 
one it is only insinuated gracefully, in the other it 
stands out offensively. The peer seems to have 
written with his coronet on, and his Earl's mantle 
before him ; the commoner in his elbow chair and 
undress. — What can be more pleasant than the way 
in which the retired statesman peeps out in the essays, 
penned by the latter in his dehghtful retreat at Shene? 
They scent of Nimeguen, and the Hague. Scarce an 
authority is quoted under an ambassador. Don Fran- 
cisco de Melo, a " Portugal Envoy in England," tells 
him it was frequent in his country for men, spent with 
age or other decays, so as they could not hope for 
above a year or two of life, to ship themselves away in 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 95 

a Brazil fleet, and after their arrival there to go on a 
great length, sometimes of twenty or thirty years, or 
more, by the force of that vigour they recovered with 
that remove. "Whether such an effect (Temple 
beautifully adds) might grow from the air, or the 
fruits of that climate, or by approaching nearer the 
sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, when 
their natural heat was so far decayed : or whether 
the piecing out of an old man's life were worth the 
pains ; I cannot tell : perhaps the play is not worth 
the candle." — Monsieur Pompone, " French Ambas- 
sador in his (Sir William's) time at the Hague," cer- 
tifies him, that in his life he had never heard of any 
man in France that arrived at a hundred years of 
age ; a limitation of life which the old gentleman im- 
putes to the excellence of their climate, giving them 
such a liveliness of temper and humour, as disposes them 
to more pleasures of all kinds than in other countries ; 
and moralises upon the matter very sensibly. The 
"late Robert Earl of Leicester " furnishes him with a 
story of a Countess of Desmond, married out of Eng- 
land in Edward the Fourth's time, and who lived far 
in King James's reign. The " same noble person " 
gives him an account, how such a year, in the same 
reign, there went about the country a set of morrice- 
dancers, composed of ten men who danced, a Maid 
Marian, and a tabor and pipe ; and how these twelve, 
one with another, made up twelve hundred years. 



96 THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 

" It was not so much (says Temple) that so many in 
one small county (Herefordshire) should live to that 
age, as that they should be in vigour and in humour 
to travel and to dance." Monsieur Zuhchem, one of 
his " colleagues at the Hague/' informs him of a cure 
for the gout ; which is confirmed by another " Envoy," 
Monsieur Serinchamps, in that town, who had tried it. 
— Old Prince Maurice of Nassau recommends to him 
the use of hammocks in that complaint ; having been 
allured to sleep, while suffering under it himself, by 
the '^ constant motion or swinging of those airy beds." 
Count Egmont, and the Rhinegrave who " was killed 
last summer before Maestricht," impart to him their 
experiences. 

But the rank of the writer is never more innocently 
disclosed, than where he takes for granted the com- 
pliments paid by foreigners to his fruit-trees. For 
the taste and perfection of what we esteem the best, 
he can truly say, that the French, who have eaten his 
peaches and grapes at Shene in no very ill year, have 
generally concluded that the last are as good as any 
they have eaten in France on this side Fontainbleau ; 
and the first as good as any they have eat in Gascony. 
Italians have agreed his white figs to be as good as 
any of that sort in Italy, which is the earlier kind of 
white fig there ; for in the later kind and the blue, we 
cannot come near the warm climates, no more than in 
the Frontignac or Muscat grape. His orange-trees too, 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 97 

are as large as any he saw when he was young in France, 
except those of Fontainbleau, or what he has seen since 
in the Low Countries ; except some very old ones of 
the Prince of Orange's. Of grapes he had the honour 
of bringing over four sorts into England, which he 
enumerates, and supposes that they are all by this 
time pretty common among some gardeners in his 
neighbourhood, as well as several persons of quality ; 
for he ever thought all things of this kind " the com- 
moner they are made the better." The garden pe- 
dantry with which he asserts that 'tis to little purpose 
to plant any of the best fruits, as peaches or grapes, 
hardly, he doubts, beyond Northamptonshire at the 
furthest northwards ; and praises the " Bishop of 
Munster at Cosevelt," for attempting nothing beyond 
cherries in that cold climate ; is equally pleasant and 
in character. " I may perhaps " (he thus ends his 
sweet Garden Essay with a passage worthy of Cowley) 
^' be allowed to know something of this trade, since I 
have so long allowed myself to be good for nothing 
else, which few men will do, or enjoy their gardens, 
without often looking abroad to see how other matters 
play, what motions in the state, and what invitations 
they may hope for into other scenes. For my own 
part, as the country life, and this part of it more par- 
ticularly, were the inclination of my youth itself, so 
they are the pleasure of my age ; and I can truly say 
that, among many great employments that have fallen 

7 



98 THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 

to my share, I have never asked or sought for any of 
them, but have often endeavoured to escape from 
them, into the ease and freedom of a private scene, 
where a man may go his own way and his own pace, 
in the common paths and circles of hfe. The mea- 
sure of choosing well is whether a man likes what he 
has chosen, which I thank God has befallen me ; and 
though among the follies of my life, building and 
planting have not been the least, and have cost me 
more than I have the confidence to own ; yet they 
have been fully recompensed by the sweetness and 
satisfaction of this retreat, where, since my resolution 
taken of never entering again into any public employ- 
ments, I have passed five years without ever once 
going to town, though I am almost in sight of it, and 
have a house there always ready to receive me. Nor 
has this been any sort of affectation, as some have 
thought it, but a mere want of desire or humour to 
make so small a remove ; for when I am in this 
corner, I can truly say with Horace, Me quoties 
reficit, &'c. 

" Me, when the cold Digentian stream revives, 
What does my friend believe I think or ask ? 
Let me yet less possess, so I may live, 

- Whatever of life remains, unto myself. 
May I have books enough ; and one year's store, 
Not to depend upon each doubtful hour ; 
This is enough of mighty Jove to pray, 
Who, as he pleases, gives and takes away." 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 99 

The writings of Temple are, in general, after this 
easy copy. On one occasion, indeed, his wit, which 
was mostly subordinate to nature and tenderness, has 
seduced him into a string of felicitous antitheses ; 
which, it is obvious to remark, have been a model to 
Addison and succeeding essayists. " Who would not 
be covetous, and with reason," he says, "if health 
could be purchased with gold? who not ambitious, if 
it were at the command of power, or restored by 
honour? but, alas ! a white staff will not help gouty 
feet to walk better than a common cane ; nor a blue 
riband bind up a wound so well as a fillet. The 
glitter of gold, or of diamonds, will but hurt sore eyes 
instead of curing them ; and an aching head will be 
no more eased by wearing a crown, than a common 
night-cap." In a far better style, and more accord- 
ant with his own humour of plainness, are the con- 
cluding sentences of his "Discourse upon Poetry." 
Temple took a part in the controversy about the 
ancient and the modern learning; and, with that 
partiality so natural and so graceful in an old man, 
whose state engagements ad left him little leisure to 
look into modern productions, while his retirement 
gave him occasion to look back upon the classic 
studies of his youth — decided in favour of the latter. 
" Certain it is," he says, " that, whether the fierce- 
ness of the Gothic humours, or noise of their per- 
petual wars, frighted it away, or that the unequal 



lOO. THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 

mixture of the modern languages would not bear it — - 
the great heights and excellency both of poetry and 
music fell with the Roman learning and empire, and 
have never since recovered the admiration and ap- 
plauses that before attended them. Yet, such as they 
are amongst us, they must be confessed to be the 
softest and sweetest, the most general and most inno- 
cent amusements of common time and life. They 
still find room in the courts of princes, and the cot- 
tages of shepherds. They serve to revive and animate 
the dead calm of poor and idle lives, and to allay or 
divert the violent passions and perturbations of the 
greatest and the busiest men. And both these effects 
are of equal use to human life ; for the mind of man 
is like the sea, which is neither agreeable to the 
beholder nor the voyager, in a calm or in a storm, 
but is so to both when a Httle agitated by gentle 
gales j and so the mind, when moved by soft and 
easy passions or affections. I know very well that 
many who pretend to be wise by the forms of being 
grave, are apt to despise both poetry and music, as 
toys and trifles too light for the use or entertainment 
of serious men. But whoever find themselves wholly 
insensible to their charms, would, I think, do well to 
keep their own counsel, for fear of reproaching their 
own temper, and bringing the goodness of their 
natures, if not of their understandings, into question. 
While this world lasts, I doubt not but the pleasure 



THE GENTEEL STYLE IN WRITING. 10 1 

and request of these two entertainments will do so 
too ; and happy those that content themselves with 
these, or any other so easy and so innocent, and do 
not trouble the world or other men, because they 
cannot be quiet themselves, though nobody hurts 
them." "When all is done (he concludes), human 
life is at the greatest and the best but like a froward 
child, that must be played with, and humoured a 
little, to keep it quiet, till it falls asleep, and then the 
care is over." 



BARBARA S- 



On the noon of the 14th of November, 1743 or 4, I 
forget which it was, just as the clock had struck one, 

Barbara S , with her accustomed punctuahty 

ascended the long rambling staircase, with awkward 
interposed landing-places, which led to the office, or 
rather a sort of box with a desk in it, whereat sat the 
then Treasurer of (what few of our readers may re- 
member) the old Bath Theatre. All over the island 
it was the custom, and remains so I believe to this 
day, for the players to receive their weekly stipend 
on the Saturday. It was not much that Barbara had 
to claim. 

This little maid had just entered her eleventh year ; 
but her important station at the theatre, as it seemed 
to her, with the benefits which she felt to accrue 
from her pious application of her small earnings, had 
given an air of womanhood to her steps and to her 
behaviour. You would have taken her to have been 
at least five years older. 



BARBARA S . 103 

Till latterly she had merely been employed in 
choruses, or where children were wanted to fill up 
the scene. But the manager, observing a diligence 
and adroitness in her above her age, had for some 
few months past intrusted to her the performance of 
whole parts. You may guess the self consequence 
of the promoted Barbara. She had already drawn 
tears in young Arthur ; had ralhed Richard with in- 
fantine petulance in the Duke of York ; and in her 
turn had rebuked that petulance when she was Prince 
of Wales. She would have done the elder child in 
Morton's pathetic after-piece to the life; but as yet 
the " Children in the Wood " was not. 

Long after this little girl was grown an aged woman, 
I have seen some of these small parts, each making 
two or three pages at most, copied out in the rudest 
hand of the then prompter, who doubtless transcribed 
a little more carefully and fairly for the grown-up 
tragedy ladies of the establishment. But such as 
they were, blotted and scrawled, as for a child's use, 
she kept them all; and in the zenith of her after 
reputation it was a delightful sight to behold them 
bound up in costliest Morocco, each single — each 
small part making a book — with fine clasps, gilt- 
splashed, &c. She had conscientiously kept them as 
they had been delivered to her ; not a blot had been 
effaced or tampered with. They were precious to 
her for their affecting remembrancings. They were 



104 BARBARA S . 

her principia, her rudiments ; the elementary atoms ; 
the Uttle steps by which she pressed forward to per- 
fection. ''What," she would say, "could Indian 
rubber, or a pumice stone, have done for these 
darlings? " 

I am in no hurry to begin my story — indeed I 
have little or none to tell — so I will just mention an 
observation of hers connected with that interesting 
time. 

Not long before she died I had been discoursing 
with her on the quantity of real present emotion 
which a great tragic performer experiences during 
acting. I ventured to think, that though in the first 
instance such players must have possessed the feel- 
ings which they so powerfully called up in others, yet 
by frequent repetition those feelings must become 
deadened in great measure, and the performer trust 
to the memory of past emotion, rather than express 
a present one. She indignantly repelled the notion, 
that with a truly great tragedian the operation, by 
which such effects were produced upon an audience, 
could ever degrade itself into what was purely me- 
chanical. With much delicacy, avoiding to instance 
in her j'<?^-experience, she told me, that so long ago 
as when "she used to play the part of the Little Son to' 
Mrs. Porter's Isabella, (I think it was) when that 
impressive actress has been bending over her in some 
heart-rending colloquy, she has felt real hot tears 



BARBARA S . 105 

come trickling from her, which (to use her powerful 
expression) have perfectly scalded her back. 

I am not quite so sure that it was Mrs. Porter ; but 
it was some great actress of that day. The name is 
indifferent ; but the fact of the scalding tears I most 
distinctly remember. 

I was always fond of the society of players, and 
am not sure that an impediment in my speech (which 
certainly kept me out of the pulpit) even more than 
certain personal disqualifications, which are often got 
over in that profession, did not prevent me at one 
time of life from adopting it. I have had the honour 
(I must ever call it) once to have been admitted to 
the tea-table of M^ss K^dly-^ I have played at serious 
whist with Mr. Liston. I have chatted with ever 
good-humoured Mrs. Charles Kemble. I have con- 
versed as friend to friend with her accomplished 
husband. I have been indulged with a classical 
conference with Macready ; and with a sight of the 
Player-picture gallery, at Mr. Matthews' s, when the 
kind owner, to remunerate me for my love of the old 
actors (whom he loves so much) went over it with 
me, supplying to his capital collection, what alone the 
artist could not give them — voice ; and their living 
motion. Old tones, half-faded, of Dodd and Parsons, 
and Baddeley, have lived again for me at his bidding. 
Only Edwin he could not restore to me. I have 
supped with ; but I am growing a coxcomb. 



I06 BARBARA S . 

As I was about to say — at the desk of the then 
treasurer of the old Bath theatre — not Diamond's — 
presented herself the little Barbara S . 

The parents of Barbara had been in reputable cir- 
cumstances. The father had practised, I believe, as 
an apothecary in the town. But his practice from 
causes which I feel my own infirmity too sensibly 
that way to arraign — or perhaps from that pure in- 
felicity which accompanies some people in their walk 
through life, and which it is impossible to lay at the 
door of imprudence — was now reduced to nothing. 
They were in fact in the very teeth of starvation, 
when the manager, who knew and respected them in 
better days, took the little Barbara into his company. 

At the period I commenced with, her slender 
earnings were the sole support of the family, includ- 
ing two younger sisters. I must throw a veil over 
some mortifying circumstances. Enough to say, 
that her Saturday's pittance was the only chance of 
a Sunday's (generally their only) meal of meat. 

One thing I will only mention, that in some child's 
part, where in her theatrical character she was to 
sup off a roast fowl (O joy to Barbara !) some comic 
actor, who was for the night caterer for this dainty 
— in the .misguided humour of his part, threw over 
the dish such a qaantity of salt (O grief and pain 
of heart to Barbara !) that when he crammed a por- 
tion of it into her mouth, she was obliged sputter- 



BARBARA S- 



107 



ingly to reject it ; and what with shame of her ill- 
acted part, and pain of real appetite at missing such 
a dainty, her little heart sobbed almost to breaking, 
till a flood of tears, which the well-fed spectators 
were totally unable to comprehend, mercifully re- 
heved her. 

This was the Httle starved, meritorious maid, who 
stood before old Ravenscroft, the treasurer, for her 
Saturday's payment. 

Ravenscroft was a man, I have heard many old 
theatrical people besides herself say, of all men least 
calculated for a treasurer. He had no head for ac- 
counts, paid away at random, kept scarce any books, 
and summing up at the week's end, if he found him- 
self a pound or so deficient, blest himself that it 
was no worse. 

Now Barbara's weekly stipend was a bare half 
guinea. — By mistake he popped into her hand a — 
whole one. 

Barbara tripped away. 

She was entirely unconscious at first of the mis- 
take : God knows, Ravenscroft would never have 
discovered it. 

But when she had got down to the first of those 
uncouth landing-places, she became sensible of an 
unusual weight of metal pressing her little hand. 

Now mark the dilemma. 

She was by nature a good child. From her pa- 



I08 BARBARA S . 

rents and those about her she had imbibed no con- 
trary influence. But then they had taught her 
nothing. Poor men's smoky cabins are not always 
porticoes of moral philosophy. This little maid had 
no instinct to evil, but then she might be said to 
have no fixed principle. She had heard honesty 
commended, but never dreamed of its application 
to herself. She thought of it as something which 
concerned grown-up people — men and women. She 
had never known temptation, or thought of prepar- 
ing resistance against it. 

Her first impulse was to go back to the old treas- 
urer, and explain to him his blunder. He was al- 
ready so confused with age, besides a natural want 
of punctuality, that she would have had some diffi- 
culty in making him understand it. She saw that in 
an instant. And then it was such a bit of money ! 
and then the image of a larger allowance of butcher's 
meat on their table next day came across her, till 
her little eyes gUstened, and her mouth moistened. 
But then Mr. Ravenscroft had always been so good- 
natured, had stood her friend behind the scenes, 
and even recommended her promotion to some of 
her little parts. But again the old man was reputed 
to be worth a world of money. He was supposed 
to have fifty pounds a year clear of the theatre. 
And then came staring upon her the figures of her 
little stockingless and shoeless sisters. And when 



BARBARA S . IO9 

she looked at her own neat white cotton stockmgs, 
which her situation at the theatre had made it in- 
dispensable for her mother to provide for her, with 
hard straining and pinching from the family stock, 
and thought how glad she should be to cover their 
poor feet with the same — and how then they could 
accompany her to rehearsals, which they had hitherto 
been precluded from doing, by reason of their un- 
fashionable attire, — in these thoughts she reached 
the second landing-place — the second, I mean from 
the top — for there was still another left to traverse. 

Now virtue support Barbara ! 

And that never- failing friend did step in — for at 
that moment a strength not her own, I have heard 
her say, was revealed to her — a reason above reason- 
ing — and without her own agency, as it seemed 
(for she never felt her feet to move) she found her- 
self transported back to the individual desk she had 
just quitted, and her hand in the old hand of Ravens- 
croft, who in silence took back the refunded treasure, 
and who had been sitting (good man) insensible to 
the lapse of minutes, which to her were anxious 
ages ; and from that moment a deep peace fell 
upon her heart, and she knew the quality of 
honesty. 

A year or two's unrepining application to her pro- 
fession brightened up the feet, and the prospects, of 
her little sisters, set the whole family upon their legs 



no BARBARA S- 



again, and released her from the difficulty of dis- 
cussing moral dogmas upon a landing-place. 

I have heard her say, that it was a surprise, not 
much short of mortification to her, to see the cool- 
ness with which the old man pocketed the difference, 
which had caused her such mortal throes. 

This anecdote of herself I had in the year 1800, 
from the mouth of the late Mrs. Crawford * then 
sixty- seven years of age (she died soon after) ; and 
to her struggles upon this childish occasion I have 
sometimes ventured to think her indebted for that 
power of rending the heart in the representation of 
conflicting emotions, for which in after years she 
was considered as little inferior (if at all so in the 
part of Lady Randolph) even to Mrs. Siddons. 

* The maiden name of this lady was Street, which she 
changed, by successive marriages, for those of Dancer, Barry, 
and Crawford. She was Mrs. Crawford, and a third time a 
widow, when I knew her. 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 

IN A LETTER TO R S , ESQ. 



Though in some points of doctrine, and perhaps of 
discipline, I am diffident of lending a perfect assent 
to that church which you have so worthily historified, 
yet may the ill time never come to me, when with 
a chilled heart, or a portion of irreverent sentiment, 
I shall enter her beautiful and time-hallowed Edi- 
fices. Judge then of my mortification when, after 
attending the choral anthems of last Wednesday at 
Westminster, and being desirous of renewing my 
acquaintance, after lapsed years, with the tombs and 
antiquities there, I found myself excluded; turned 
out like a dog, or some profane person, into the 
common street, with feelings not very congenial to 
the place, or to the solemn service which I had been 
listening to. It was a jar after that music. 

You had your education at Westminster; and 
doubtless among those dim aisles and cloisters, you 
must have gathered much of that devotional feeling 
in those young years, on which your purest mind 



112 THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 

feeds still — and may it feed ! The antiquarian 
spirit, strong in you, and gracefully blending ever 
with the religious, may have been sown in you among 
those wrecks of splendid mortality. You owe it to 
the place of your education ; you owe it to your 
learned fondness for the architecture of your an- 
cestors ; you owe it to the venerableness of your 
ecclesiastical establishment, which is daily lessened 
and called in question through these practices — to 
speak aloud your sense of them ; never to desist 
raising your voice against them, till they be totally 
done away with and abolished ; till the doors of 
Westminster Abbey be no longer closed against the 
decent, though low-in-purse, enthusiast, or blameless 
devotee, who must commit an injury against his 
family economy, if he would be indulged with a bare 
admission within its walls. You owe it to the de- 
cencies, which you wish to see maintained in its 
impressive services, that our Cathedral be no longer 
an object of inspection to the poor at those times 
only, in which they must rob from their attendance 
on the worship every minute which they can bestow 
upon the fabric. In vain the public prints have 
taken up this subject, in vain such poor nameless 
writers as myself express their indignation. A word 
from you. Sir — a hint in your Journal — would be 
sufficient to fling open the doors of the Beautiful 
Temple again, as we can remember them when we 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 113 

were boys. At that time of life, what would the 
imaginative faculty (such as it is) in both of us, 
have suffered, if the entrance to so much reflection 
had been obstructed by the demand of so much 
silver ! — If we had scraped it up to gain an occa- 
sional admission (as we certainly should have done) 
would the sight of those old tombs have been as 
impressive to us (while we had been weighing 
anxiously prudence against sentiment) as when the 
gates stood open, as those of the adjacent Park ; 
when we could walk in at any time, as the mood 
brought us, for a shorter or longer time, as that 
lasted? Is the being shown over a place the same 
as silently for ourselves detecting the genius of it? 
In no part of our beloved Abbey now can a person 
find entrance (out of service time) under the sum 
of two shillings. The rich and the great will smile 
at the anticlimax, presumed to lie in these two short 
words. But you can tell them. Sir, how much quiet 
worth, how much capacity for enlarged feeling, how 
much taste and genius, may coexist, especially in 
youth, with a purse incompetent to this demand. — 
A respected friend of ours, during his late visit to 
the metropolis, presented himself for admission to 
Saint Paul's. At the same time a decently clothed 
man, with as decent a wife, and child, were bar- 
gaining for the same indulgence. The price was 
only two-pence each person. The poor but decent 

8 



114 THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 

man hesitated, desirous to go in ; but there were 
three of them, and he turned away reluctantly. 
Perhaps he wished to have seen the tomb of Nelson. 
Perhaps the Interior of the Cathedral was his object. 
But in the state of his finances, even sixpence might 
reasonably seem too much. Tell the Aristocracy of 
the country (no man can do it more impressively) ; 
instruct them of what value these insignificant pieces 
of money, these minims to their sight, may be to 
their humbler brethren. Shame these Sellers out 
of the Temple. Stifle not the suggestions of your 
better nature with the pretext, that an indiscriminate 
admission would expose the Tombs to violation. 
Remember your boy-days. Did you ever see, or 
hear, of a mob in the Abbey, while it was free to 
all? Do the rabble come there, or trouble their 
heads about such speculations? It is all that you 
can do to drive them into your churches ; they do 
not voluntarily offer themselves. They have, alas ! 
no passion for antiquities ; for tomb of king or 
prelate, sage or poet. If they had, they would be 
no longer the rabble. 

For forty years that I have known the Fabric, the 
only well-attested charge of violation adduced, has 
been -— a ridiculous dismemberment committed upon 
the effigy of that amiable spy, Major Andr^. And 
is it for this — the wanton mischief of some school- 
boy, fired perhaps with raw notions of Transatlantic 



THE TOMBS IN THE ABBEY. 1 15 

Freedom — or the remote possibility of such a mis- 
chief occurring again, so easily to be prevented by 
stationing a constable within the walls, if the vergers 
are incompetent to the duty — is it upon such 
wretched pretences, that the people of England are 
made to pay a new Peter's Pence, so long abro- 
gated ; or must content themselves with contem- 
plating the ragged Exterior of their Cathedral ? The 
mischief was done about the time that you were a 
scholar there. Do you know any thing about the 
unfortunate relic? — 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 



Where were ye, Nymphs, when the remorseless deep 
Clos'd o'er the head of your loved Lycidas ? 



I DO not know when I have experienced a stranger 
sensation, than on seeing my old friend G. D., who 
had been paying me a morning visit a few Sundays 
back, at my cottage at Islington, upon taking leave, 
instead of turning down the right hand path by which 
he had entered — with staff in hand, and at noon 
day, deliberately march right forwards into the midst 
of the stream that runs by us, and totally disappear. 

A spectacle like this at dusk would have been 
appalling enough ; but, in the broad open daylight, 
to witness such an unreserved motion towards self- 
destruction in a valued friend, took from me all 
power of speculation. 

How I found my feet, I know not. Consciousness 
was quite gone. Some spirit, not my own, whirled 
me to the spot. I remember nothing but the silvery 
apparition of a good white head emerging ; nigh 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 117 

which a staff (the hand unseen that wielded it) 
pointed upwards, as feeUng for the skies. In a 
moment (if time was in that time) he was on my 
shoulders, and I — freighted with a load more pre- 
cious than his who bore Anchises. 

And here I cannot but do justice to the officious 
zeal of sundry passers by, who, albeit arriving a little 
too late to participate in the honours of the rescue, 
in philanthropic shoals came thronging to commu- 
nicate their advice as to the recovery; prescribing 
variously the application, or non-application, of salt, 
&c., to the person of the patient. Life meantime 
was ebbing fast away, amidst the stifle of conflicting 
judgments, when one, more sagacious than the rest, 
by a bright thought, proposed sending for the Doctor. 
Trite as the counsel was, and impossible, as one 
should think, to be missed on, — shall I confess ? — 
in this emergency, it was to me as if an Angel had 
spoken. Great previous exertions — and mine had 
not been inconsiderable — are commonly followed 
by a debility of purpose. This was a moment of 
irresolution. 

MoNOCULUS — for so, in default of catching his 
true name, I choose to designate the medical gentle- 
man who now appeared — is a grave, middle-aged 
person, who, without having studied at the college, or 
truckled to the pedantry of a diploma, hath employed 
a great portion of his valuable time in experimental 



Il8 AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 

processes upon the bodies of unfortunate fellow- 
creatures, in whom the vital spark, to mere vulgar 
thinking, would seem extinct, and lost for ever. He 
oraitteth no occasion of obtruding his services, from 
a case of common surfeit-suffocation to the ignobler 
obstructions, sometimes induced by a too wilful ap- 
plication of the plant Cannabis outwardly. But 
though he declineth not altogether these drier ex- 
tinctions, his occupation tendeth for the most part 
to water-practice ; for the convenience of which, he 
hath judiciously fixed his quarters near the grand 
repository of the stream mentioned, where, day and 
night, from his little watch-tower, at the Middleton's- 
Head, he listeneth to detect the wrecks of drowned 
mortality — partly, as he saith, to be upon the spot 
— and partly, because the liquids which he useth to 
prescribe to himself and his patients, on these dis- 
tressing occasions, are ordinarily more conveniently 
to be found at these common hostelries, than in the 
shops and phials of the apothecaries. His ear hath 
arrived to such finesse by practice, that it is reported, 
he can distinguish a plunge at a half furlong distance ; 
and can tell, if it be casual or deliberate. He wear- 
eth a medal, suspended over a suit, originally of a 
sad brown, but which, by time, and frequency of 
nightly divings, has been dinged into a true pro- 
fessional sable. He passeth by the name of Doctor, 
and is remarkable for wanting his left eye. His 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 



119 



remedy — after a sufficient application of warm 
blankets, friction, &c., is a simple tumbler, or more, 
of the purest Cognac, with water, made as hot as 
the convalescent can bear it. Where he findeth, as 
in the case of my friend, a squeamish subject, he 
condescendeth to be the taster; and showeth, by 
his own example, the innocuous nature of the pre- 
scription. Nothing can be more kind or encourag- 
ing than this procedure. It addeth confidence to 
the patient, to see his medical adviser go hand in 
hand with himself in the remedy. When the doctor 
swalloweth his own draught, what peevish invalid 
can refuse to pledge him in the potion? In fine, 
MoNOCULus is a humane, sensible man, who, for a 
slender pittance, scarce enough to sustain life, is 
content to wear it out in the endeavour to save the 
lives of others — his pretensions so moderate, that 
with difficulty I could press a crown upon him, for 
the price of restoring the existence of such an in- 
valuable creature to society as G. D. 

It was pleasant to observe the effect of the subsid- 
ing alarm upon the nerves of the dear absentee. It 
seemed to have given a shake to memory, calling up 
notice after notice, of all the providential deliver- 
ances he had experienced in the course of his long 
and innocent life. Sitting up in my couch — my 
couch which, naked and void of furniture hitherto, 
for the salutary repose which it administered, shall 



I20 AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 

be honoured with costly valance, at some price, and 
henceforth be a state-bed at Colebrook, — he dis- 
coursed of marvellous escapes — by carelessness of 
nurses — by pails of gelid, and kettles of the boiling 
element, in infancy — by orchard pranks, and snap- 
ping twigs, in schoolboy frolics — by descent of tiles 
at Trumpington, and of heavier tomes at Pembroke 

— by studious watchings, inducing frightful vigilance 

— by want, and the fear of want, and all the sore 
throbbings of the learned head. — Anon, he would 
burst out into little fragments of chaunting — of 
songs long ago — ends of deliverance-hymns, not 
remembered before since childhood, but coming up 
now, when his heart was made tender as a child's — 
for the tremor cordis, in the retrospect of a recent 
deliverance, as in a case of impending danger, act- 
ing upon an innocent heart, will produce a self- 
tenderness, which we should do ill to christen 
cowardice ; and Shakspeare, in the latter crisis, has 
made his good Sir Hugh to remember the sitting 
by Babylon, and to mutter of shallow rivers. 

Waters of Sir Hugh Middleton — what a spark 
you were like to have extinguished for ever ! Your 
salubrious streams to this City, for now near two 
centuries, would hardly have atoned for what you 
were in a moment washing away. Mockery of a 
river — liquid artifice — wretched conduit ! hence- 
forth rank with canals, and sluggish aqueducts. 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. I2I 

Was it for this, that, smit in boyhood with the ex- 
plorations of that Abyssinian traveller, I paced the 
vales of Aniwell to explore your tributary springs, to 
trace your salutary waters sparkling through green 
Hertfordshire, and cultured Enfield parks?— Ye 
have no swans — no Naiads — no river God — or 
did the benevolent hoary aspect of my friend tempt 
ye to suck him in, that ye also might have the 
tutelary genius of your waters? 

Had he been drowned in Cam there would have 
been some consonancy in it ; but what willows had 
ye to wave and rustle over his moist sepulture ? — 
or, having no name, besides that unmeaning assump- 
tion of eternal novity, did ye think to get one by 
the noble prize, and henceforth to be termed the 
Stream Dyerian? 

And could such spacious virtue find a grave 
Beneath the imposthumed bubble of a wave ? 

I protest, George, you shall not venture out again 
— no, not by daylight — without a sufficient pair 
of spectacles — in your musing moods especially. 
Your absence of mind we have borne, till your pres- 
ence of body came to be called in question by it. 
You shall not go wandering into Euripus with Aris- 
totle, if we can help it. Fie, man, to turn dipper 
at your years, after your many tracts in favour of 
sprinkling only ! 

I have nothing but water in my head o' nights 



122 AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 

since this frightful accident. Sometimes I am with 
Clarence in his dream. At others, I behold Chris- 
tian beginning to sink, and crying out to his good 
brother Hopeful (that is to me), *' I sink in deep 
waters ; the billows go over my head, all the waves 
go over me. Selah." Then I have before me 
Palinurus, just letting go the steerage. I cry out 
too late to save. Next follow — a mournful proces- 
sion — suicidal faces, saved against their wills from 
drowning; dolefully trailing a length of reluctant 
gratefulness, with ropy weeds pendant from locks 
of watchet hue — constrained Lazari — Pluto's half- 
subjects — stolen fees from the grave — bilking Cha- 
ron of his fare. At their head Arion — or is it 
G. D. ? — in his singing garments marcheth singly, 
with harp in hand, and votive garland, which 
Machaon (or Dr. Hawes) snatcheth straight, intend- 
ing to suspend it to the stern God of Sea. Then 
follow dismal streams of Lethe, in which the half- 
drenched on earth are constrained to drown down- 
right, by wharfs where Ophelia twice acts her muddy 
death. 

And, doubtless, there is some notice in that in- 
visible- world, when one of us approacheth (as my 
friend did so lately) to their inexorable precincts. 
When a soul knocks once, twice, at death's door, 
the sensation aroused within the palace must be 
considerable ; and the grim Feature, by modern 



AMICUS REDIVIVUS. 123 

science so often dispossessed of liis prey, must have 
learned by this time to pity Tantalus. 

A pulse assuredly was felt along the line of the 
Elysian shades, when the near arrival of G. D. was 
announced by no equivocal indications. From their 
seats of Asphodel arose the gentler and the graver 
ghosts — poet, or historian — of Grecian or of Roman 
lore — to crown with unfading chaplets the half- 
finished love-labours of their unwearied scholiast. 
Him Markland expected — him Tyrwhitt hoped to 
encounter — him the sweet lyrist of Peter House, 
whom he had barely seen upon earth*, with newest 

airs prepared to greet ; and, patron of the 

gentle Christ's boy, — who should have been his 
patron through life — the mild Askew, with longing 
aspirations, leaned foremost from his venerable 
iEsculapian chair, to welcome into that happy com- 
pany the matured virtues of the man, whose tender 
scions in the boy he himself upon earth had so 
prophetically fed and watered. 

* Graium tantum vidit. 



SOME SONNETS OF SIR PHILIP 
SYDNEY. 



Sydney's Sonnets — I speak of the best of them — 
are among the very best of their sort. They fall 
below the plain moral dignity, the sanctity, and high 
yet modest spirit of self- approval, of Milton, in his 
compositions of a similar structure. They are in 
truth what Milton, censuring the Arcadia, says of 
that work (to which they are a sort of after-tune or 
application), "vain and amatorious " enough, yet 
the things in their kind (as he confesses to be true 
of the romance) may be "full of worth and wit." 
They savour of the courtier, it must be allowed, and 
not of the Commonwealthsman. But Milton was a 
Courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow 
Castle, and still more a Courtier when he composed 
the Arcades. When the national struggle was to 
begin, he becomingly cast these vanities behind him ; 
and if the order of time had thrown Sir Philip upon 
the crisis which preceded the Revolution, there is 
no reason why he should not have acted the same 



SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 1 25 

part in that emergency, which has glorified the name 
of a later Sydney. He did not want for plamness 
or boldness of spirit. His letter on the French 
match may testify, he could speak his mind freely 
to Princes. The times did not call him to the 

scaffold. 

The Sonnets which we oftenest call to mmd of 
Milton were the compositions of his maturest years. 
Those of Sydney, which I am about to produce, 
were written in the very hey-day of his blood. .They 
are stuck full of amorous fancies - far-fetched con- 
ceits, befitting his occupation ; for True Love thmks 
no labour to send out Thoughts upon the vast, and 
more than Indian voyages, to bring home rich pearls, 
outlandish wealth, gums, jewels, spicery, to sacrifice 
in self-depreciating similitudes, as shadows of true 
amiabilities in the Beloved. We must be Lovers - 
or at least the cooling touch of time, the circum prcB- 
cordiafrigus, must not have so damped our facul- 
ties, as to take away our recollection that we were 
once so —before we can duly appreciate the glorious 
vanities, and graceful hyperboles, of the passion. 
The images which lie before our feet (though by 
some accounted the only natural) are least natural 
for the high Sydnean love to express its fancies by. 
They may serve for the loves of Tibullus, or the 
dear Author of the Schoolmistress; for passions that 
creep and whine in Elegies and Pastoral Ballads. I 



126 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 

am sure Milton never loved at this rate. I am afraid 
some of his addresses {ad Leonoram I mean) have 
rather erred on the farther side ; and that the poet 
came not much short of a religious indecorum, when 
he could thus apostrophise a singing girl : — 

Angelus unicuique suus (sic credite gentes) 

Obtigit aetheriiis ales ab ordinibus. 
Quid mirum, Leonora, tibi si gloria major, 

Nam tua praesentem vox sonat ipsa Deum? 
Aut Deus, aut vacui carte mens tertia cceli 

Per tua secreto guttura serpit agens ; 
Serpit agens, facilisque docet mortalia corda 

Sensim immortali assuescere posse sono. 
Quod si cuncta quidem Deus est, per cuncta- 
que fusus. 

In TE UNA LOQUITUR, CETERA MUTUS HABET. 

This is loving in a strange fashion ; and it requires 
some candour of construction (besides the slight 
darkening of a dead language) to cast a veil over 
the ugly appearance of something very like blas- 
phemy in the last two verses. I think the Lover 
would have been staggered, if he had gone about 
to express the same thought in English. I am sure, 
Sydney has no flights like this. His extravaganzas 
do not strike at the sky, though he takes leave to 
adopt the pale Dian into a fellowship with his 
mortal passions. 



SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 12/ 



I. 



With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies ; 

How silently ; and with how wan a face ! 

What ! may it be, that even in heavenly place 

That busy Archer his sharp arrows tries ? 

Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes 

Can judge of love, thou f eel'st a lover's case ; 

I read it m thy looks ; thy languisht grace 

To me, that feel the like, thy state descries. 

Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me. 

Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit? 

Are beauties there as proud as here they be ? 

Do they above love to be loved, and yet 

Those lovers scorn, whom that love doth possess? 

Do they call virtue there — tuigr ate fulness ? 

The last line of this poem is a little obscured by 
transposition.- He means, Do they call ungrateful- 
ness there a virtue? 

II. 

Come, Sleep, O Sleep, the certain knot of peace, 
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe. 
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release, 
The indifferent judge between the high and low; 
With shield of proof shield me from out the prease * 
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw ; 

make in me those civil wars to cease : 

1 will good tribute pay, if thou do so. 

Take thou of me sweet pillows, sweetest bed; 
A chamber deaf to noise, and bhnd to light; 

* Press 



128 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS, 

A rosy garland, and a weary head. 
And if these things, as being thine by right, 
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me, 
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see. 



III. 

The curious wits, seeing dull pensiveness 
Bewray itself in my long-settled eyes, 
Whence those same fumes of melancholy rise. 
With idle pains, and missing aim, do guess. 
Some, that know how my spring I did address, 
Deem that my Muse some fruit of knowledge plies; 
Others, because the Prince my service tries. 
Think, that I think state errors to redress ; 
But harder judges judge, ambition's rage. 
Scourge of itself, still climbing slippery place. 
Holds my young brain captiv'd in golden cage. 
O fools, or over wise! alas, the race 
Of all my thoughts hath neither stop nor start, 
But only Stella's eyes, and Stella's heart. 



IV. 

Because I oft in dark abstracted guise 

Seem most alone in greatest company, 

With dearth of words, or answers quite awry, 

To them that would make speech of speech arise ; 

They deem, and of their doom the rumour flies, 

That poison foul of bubbling Pj^ide doth lie 

So in my swelling breast, that only I 

Fawn on myself, and others do despise ; 

Yet Pride, I think, doth not my Soul possess. 

Which looks too oft in his unflattering glass : 



SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 1 29 

But one worse fault — Ambition — I confess, 
That makes me oft my best friends overpass, 
Unseen, unheard — while Thought to highest place 
Bends all his powers, even unto Stella's grace. 



V. 

Having this day, my horse, my hand, my lance, 
Guided so well that I obtained the prize. 
Both by the judgment of the English eyes, 
And of some sent from that sweet enemy, — France ; 
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance ; 
Townsfolks my strength ; a daintier judge applies 
His praise to sleight, which from good use doth rise ; 
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance ; 
Others, because of both sides I do take 
My blood from them, who did excel in this, 
Think Nature me a man of arms did make. 
How far they shot awry \ the true cause is, 
Stella look'd on, and from her heavenly face 
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race. 



VL 

In martial sports I had my cunning tried, 
And yet to break more staves did me address, 
While with the people's shouts (I must confess) 
Youth, luck, and praise, even fill'd my veins with pride 
When Cupid, having me (his slave) descried 
In Mars's livery, prancing in the press, 
" What now, Sir Fool ! " said he ; "I would no less : 
Look here, I say." I look'd, and Stella spied, 
Who hard by made a window send forth light. 
My heart then quak'd, then dazzled were mine eyes ; 

9 



I30 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 

One hand forgot to rule, th' other to fight ; 
Nor trumpet's sound I heard, nor friendly cries. 
My foe came on, and beat the air for me — 
Till that her blush made me my shame to see. 

VII. 

No more, my dear, no more these counsels try ; 

give my passions leave to run their race ; 
Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace ; 

Let folk o'er-charged with brain against me cry; 
Let clouds bedim my face, break in mine eye ; 
Let me no steps, but of lost labour, trace ; 
Let all the earth with scorn recount my case — 
But do not will me from my love to fly. 

1 do not envy Aristotle's wit. 

Nor do aspire to Caesar's bleeding fame ; 
Nor aught do care, though some above me sit ; 
Nor hope, nor wish, another course to frame, 
But that which once may win thy cruel heart : 
Thou art my wit, and thou my virtue art 

VIII, 

Love still a boy, and oft a wanton, is. 

Schooled only by his mother's tender eye ; 

What wonder then, if he his lesson miss. 

When for so soft a rod dear play he try ? 

And yet my Star, because a sugar'd kiss 

In sport I suck'd, while she asleep did lie. 

Doth lour, nay chide, nay threat, for only this. 

Sweet, it was saucy Love, not humble L 

But no 'scuse serves ; she makes her wrath appear 

In beauty's throne — see now, who dares come near 

Those scarlet judges, threat'ning bloody pain? 

O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face 



SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 13I 

Anger invests with such a lovely grace, 
That anger's self 1 needs must kiss again. 

IX. 

I never drank of Aganippe well, 

Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit. 

And Muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell ; 

Poor lay-man I, for sacred rites unfit. 

Some do I hear of Poets' fury tell, 

But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it ; 

And this I swear by blackest brook of hell, 

I am no pick-purse of another's wit. 

How falls it then, that with so smooth an ease 

My thoughts I speak, and what I speak doth flow 

In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please? 

Guess me the cause — what is it thus ? — fye, no. 

Or so ? — much less. How then ? sure thus it is, 

My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's kiss. 

X. 

Of all the kings that ever here did reign, 
Edward, named Fourth, as first in praise I name, 
Not for his fair outside, nor well-lined brain — 
Although less gifts imp feathers oft on Fame. 
Nor that he could, young-wise, wise-valiant, frame 
His sire's revenge, join'd with a kingdom's gain; 
And, gain'd by Mars could yet mad Mars so tame, 
That Balance weigh'd what Sword did late obtain. 
Nor that he made the Floure-de-luce so 'fraid. 
Though strongly hedged of bloody Lions' paws, 
That witty Lewis to him a tribute paid. 
Nor this, nor that, nor any such small cause — 
But only, for this worthy knight durst prove 
To lose his crown rather than fail his love. 



132 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS, 



XI. 

happy Thames, that didst my Stella bear, 

1 saw thyself, with many a smiling I'lne 
Upon thy cheerful face, Joy's livery wear. 
While those fair planets on thy streams did shine; 
The boat for joy could not to dance forbear, 
While wanton winds, with beauty so divine 
Ravish'd, stay'd not, till in her golden hair 
They did themselves (O sweetest prison) twine. 
And fain those ^ol's youth there would their stay 
Have made ; but, forced by nature still to fly, 
First did with puffing kiss those locks display. 
She, so dishevell'd, blush'd ; from window I 
With sight thereof cried out, O fair disgrace. 

Let honour's self to thee grant highest place ! 



XII. 

Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be; 
And that my Muse, to some ears not unsweet. 
Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet, 
More soft than to a chamber melody, — 
Now blessed You bear onward blessed Me 
To Her, where I my heart safe left shall meet, 
My Muse and I must you of duty greet 
With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully. 
Be you still fair, honour'd by public heed. 
By no encroachment wrong'd, nor time forgot; 
Nor blam'd for blood, nor shamed for sinful deed. 
And that you know, I envy you no lot 
Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, 
Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss. 



SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 133 

Of the foregoing, the first, the second, and the 
last sonnet, are my favourites. But the general 
beauty of them all is, that they are so perfectly char- 
acteristical. The spirit of " learning and of chivalry," 
— of which union, Spenser has entitled Sydney to 
have been the " president," — shines through them. 
I confess I can see nothing of the "jejune" or 
"frigid" in them; much less of the "stiff" and 
"cumbrous" — which I have sometimes heard ob- 
jected to the Arcadia. The verse runs off swiftly and 
gallantly. It might have been tuned to the trumpet ; 
or tempered (as himself expresses it) to " trampling 
horses' feet." They abound in felicitous phrases — 

O heav'nly Fool, thy most kiss-worthy face — 

Zth Sonnet. 

Sweet pillows, sweetest bed ; 

A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light ; 

A rosy garland, and a weary head. 

2.nd Sonnet. 

. That sweet enemy, — France — 

%th Sonnet. 

But they are not rich in words only, in vague and 
unlocalised feelings — the failing too much of some 
poetry of the present day — they are full, material, 
and circumstantiated. Time and place appropriates 
every one of them. It is not a fever of passion wast- 
ing itself upon a thin diet of dainty words, but a tran- 



134 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 

scendent passion pervading and illuminating action, 
pursuits, studies, feats of arms, the opinions of con- 
temporaries and his judgment of them. An historical 
thread runs through them, which almost affixes a date 
to them; marks the when and where they were 
written. 

I have dwelt the longer upon what I conceive the 
merit of these poems, because I have been hurt by 
the wantonness (I wish I could treat it by a gentler 
name) with which W. H. takes every occasion of in- 
sulting the memory of Sir Philip Sydney. But the 
decisions of the Author of Table Talk, &c., (most 
profound and subtle where they are, as for the most 
part, just) are more safely to be relied upon, on sub- 
jects and authors he has a partiality for, than on such 
as he has conceived an accidental prejudice against. 
Milton wrote Sonnets, and was a king- hater; and it 
was congenial perhaps to sacrifice a courtier to a 
patriot. But I was unwilling to lose ?ifine idea from 
my mind. The noble images, passions, sentiments, 
and poetical delicacies of character, scattered all over 
the Arcadia (spite of some stiifness and encumber- 
ment), justify to me the character which his contem- 
poraries have left us of the writer. I cannot think 
with the Critic, that Sir Philip Sydney was that op- 
probrious thing which a foolish nobleman in his inso- 
lent hostility chose to term him. I call to mind the 
epitaph made on him, to guide me to juster thoughts 



SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 135 

of him ; and I repose upon the beautiful hnes in the 
'•' Friend's Passion for his Astrophel," printed with 
the Elegies of Spenser and others. 



You knew — who knew not Astrophel? 
(That I should live to say I knew, 
And have not in possession still !) — 
Things known permit me to renew — 
Of him you know his merit such, 
I cannot say — you hear — too much. 

Within these woods of Arcady 

He chief delight and pleasure 

And on the mountain Partheny, 

Upon the crystal liquid brook, 
The Muses met him every day, 
That taught him sing, to write, and say. 

When he descended down the mount, 
His personage seemed most divine: 
A thousand graces one might count 
Upon his lovely chearful eyne. 

To hear him speak, and sweetly smile, 
You were in Paradise the while. 

A sweet attractive kind af grace ; 

A full assurance given by looks j 

Continual cofnfort in a face, 

The lineantents of Gospel books — 
I trow that count'nance cannot lye, 
Whose thoughts are' legible in the eye. 



136 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY'S SONNETS. 

Above all others this is he, 
Which erst approved in his song, 
That love and honour might agree, 
And that pure love will do no wrong. 
Sweet saints, it is no sin or blame 
To love a man of virtuous name. 

Did never Love so sweetly breathe 

In any mortal breast before : 

Did never Muse inspire beneath 

A Poet's brain with finer store. 

He wrote of Love with high conceit, 
And Beauty rear'd above her height. 

Or let any one read the deeper sorrows (grief 
running into rage) in the Poem, — the last in the 
collection accompanying the above, — which from 
internal testimony I believe to be Lord Brooke's, — 
beginning with " Silence augmenteth grief," — and 
then seriously ask himself, whether the subject of 
such absorbing and confounding regrets could have 
been that thing which Lord Oxford termed him. 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS 
AGO. 



Dan Stuart once told us, that he did not remember 
that he ever deliberately walked into the Exhibition 
at Somerset House in his life. He might occasion- 
ally have escorted a party of ladies across the way 
that were going in ; but he never went in of his own 
head. Yet the office of the Morning Post newspaper 
stood then just where it does now — we are carrying 
you back, Reader, some thirty years or more — with 
its gilt- globe -topt front facing that emporium of our 
artists' grand Annual Exposure. We sometimes wish, 
that we had observed the same abstinence with 
Daniel. 

A word or two of D. S. He ever appeared to us 
one of the finest tempered of Editors. Perry, of 
the Morning Chronicle, was equally pleasant, with a 
dash, no slight one either, of the courtier. S. was 
frank, plain, and English all over. We have worked 
for both these gentlemen. 



138 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

It is soothing to contemplate the head of the 
Ganges ; to trace the first Httle bubbhngs of a 
mighty river; 

With holy reverence to approach the rocks, 
Whence glide the streams renowned in ancient song. 

Fired with a perusal of the Abyssinian Pilgrim's 
exploratory ramblings after the cradle of the infant 
Nilus, we well remember on one fine summer holy- 
day (a "whole day's leave" we called it at Christ's 
Hospital) sallying forth at rise of sun, not very well 
provisioned either for such an undertaking, to trace 
the current of the New River — Middletonian stream ! 
— to its scaturient source, as we had read, in mead- 
ows by fair Amwell. Gallantly did we commence 
our solitary quest — for it was . essential to the dig- 
nity of a Discovery, that no eye of schoolboy, save 
our own, should beam on the detection. By flowery 
spots, and verdant lanes, skirting Hornsey, Hope 
trained us on in many a baffling turn ; endless, hope- 
less meanders, as it seemed ; or as if the jealous 
waters had dodged us, reluctant to have the humble 
spot of their nativity revealed ; till spent, and nigh 
famished, before set of the same sun, we sate down 
somewhere by Bowes Farm, near Tottenham, with 
a tithe of our proposed labours only yet accom- 
plished ; sorely convinced in spirit, that that Brucian 
enterprise was as yet too arduous for our young 
shoulders. 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 139 

Not more refreshing to the thirsty curiosity of the 
traveller is the tracing of some mighty waters up to 
their shallow fontlet, than it is to a pleased and 
candid reader to go back to the inexperienced es- 
says, the first callow flights in authorship, of some 
established name in literature ; from the Gnat which 
preluded to the ^neid, to the Duck which Samuel 
Johnson trod on. 

In those days every Morning Paper, as an essential 
retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who 
was bound to furnish daily a quantum of witty para- 
graphs. Sixpence a joke — and it was thought pretty 
high too — was Dan Stuart's settled remuneration in 
these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but, above 
all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no 
paragraph was to exceed seven lines. Shorter they 
might be, but they must be poignant. 

A fashion oi flesh, or rather /////^-coloured hose for 
the ladies, luckily coming up at the juncture, when 
we were on our probation for the place of Chief 
Jester to S.'s Paper, established our reputation in 
that line. We were pronounced a " capital hand." 
O the conceits which we varied upon red in all its 
prismatic differences ! from the trite and obvious 
fljwer of Cytherea, to the flaming costume of the 
lady that has her sitting upon "many waters." Then 
there was the collateral topic of ancles. What an 
occasion to a truly chaste writer, like ourself, of 



140 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

touching that nice brink, and yet never tumbling 
over it, of a seemingly ever approximating something 
"not quite proper;" while, like a skilful posture- 
master, balancing betwixt decorums and their op- 
posites, he keeps the hne, from which a hair's- 
breadth deviation is destruction ; hovering in the 
confines of light and darkness, or where '' both seem 
either ; " a hazy uncertain delicacy ; Autolycus-like 
in the Play, still putting off his expectant auditory 
with " Whoop, do me no harm, good man ! " But, 
above all, that conceit arrided us most at that time, 
and still tickles our midriff to remember, where, al- 
lusively to the flight of Astrsea — ultima CcElestum 
terras reliqidt — we pronounced — in reference to 
the stockings still — that Modesty taking her final 

LEAVE OF MORTALS, HER LAST BlUSH WAS VISIBLE IN 
HER ASCENT TO THE HEAVENS BY THE TRACT OF THE 

GLOWING INSTEP. This might be called the crown- 
ing conceit ; and was esteemed tolerable writing in 
those days. 

But the fashion of jokes, with all other things, 
passes away ; as did the transient mode which had 
so favoured us. The ancles of our fair friends in 
a few weeks began to reassume their whiteness, and 
left us scarce a leg to stand upon. Other female 
whims followed, but none, methought, so pregnant, 
so invitatory of shrewd conceits, and more than 
single meaniiigs. 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, 141 

Somebody has said, that to swallow six cross-buns 
daily consecutively for a fortnight would surfeit the 
stoutest digestion. But to have to furnish as many 
jokes daily, and that not for a fortnight, but for a 
long twelvemonth, as we were constrained to do, 
was a little harder execution. " Man goeth forth to 
his work until the evening" — from a reasonable 
hour in the morning, we presume it was meant. 
Now as our main occupation took us up from eight 
till five every day in the City; and as our evening 
hours, at that time of life, had generally to do with 
any thing rather than business, it follows, that the 
only time we could spare for this manufactory of 
jokes — our supplementary livelihood, that supplied 
us in every want beyond mere bread and cheese — 
was exactly that part of the day which (as we have 
heard of No Man's Land) may be fitly denominated 
No Man's Time ; that is, no time in which a man 
ought to be up, and awake, in. To speak more 
plainly, it is that time, of an hour, or an hour and 
a half's duration, in which a man, whose occasions 
call him up so preposterously, has to wait for his 
breakfast. 

O those headaches at dawn of day, when at five, 
or half-past-five in summer, and not much later in 
the dark seasons, we were compelled to rise, having 
been perhaps not above four hours in bed — (for 
we were no go-to-beds with the lamb, though we 



142 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

anticipated the lark oftimes in her rising — we liked 
a parting cup at midnight, as all young men did be- 
fore these eifeminate times, and to have our friends 
about us — we were not constellated under Aqua- 
rius, that watery sign, and therefore incapable of 
Bacchus, cold, washy, bloodless — we were none of 
your Basilian water-sponges, nor had taken our 
degrees at Mount Ague — we were right toping 
Capulets, jolly companions, we and they) — but to 
have to get up, as we said before, curtailed of half 
our fair sleep, fasting, with only a dim vista of re- 
freshing Bohea in the distance — to be necessitated 
to rouse ourselves at the detestable rap of an old 
hag of a domestic, who seemed to take a diabolical 
pleasure in her announcement that it was "time to 
rise;" and whose chappy knuckles we have often 
yearned to amputate, and string them up at our 
chamber door, to be a terror to all such unseason- 
able rest-breakers in future 

*' Facil " and sweet, as Virgil sings, had been the 
*' descending " of the over-night, balmy the first sink- 
ing of the heavy head upon the pillow; but to get 
up, as he goes on to say, 

— revocare gradus, superasque evadere ad auras — 

and to get up moreover to make jokes with malice 
prepended — there was the 'Mabour," there the 
" work." 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 143 

No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery 
like to that, our slavery. No fractious operants ever 
turned out for half the tyranny, which this necessity 
exercised upon us. Half a dozen jests in a day 
(bating Sundays too), why, it seems nothing! We 
make twice the number every day in our lives as a 
matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemp- 
tions. But then they come into our head.' But 
when the head has to go out to them — when the 
mountain must go to Mahomet — 

Reader, try it for once, only for one short 
twelvemonth. 

It was not every week that a fashion of pink 
stockings came up ; but mostly, instead of it, some 
rugged, untractable subject; some topic impossible 
to be contorted into the risible ; some feature, upon 
which no smile could play ; some flint, from which 
no process of ingenuity could procure a distillation. 
There they lay ; there your appointed tale of brick- 
making was set before you, which you must finish, 
with or without straw, as it happened. The craving 
Dragon — the Public — like him in Bel's temple — 
must be fed ; it expected its daily rations ; and 
Daniel, and ourselves, to do us justice, did the best 
we could on this side bursting him. 

While we were wringing out coy sprightlinesses for 
the Post, and writhing under the toil of what is called 
"easy writing," Bob Allen, our quondam school- 



144 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

fellow, was tapping his impracticable brains in a like 
service for the " Oracle." Not that Robert troubled 
himself much about wit. If his paragraphs had a 
sprightly air about them, it was sufficient. He car- 
ried this nonchalance so far at last, that a matter of 
intelligence, and that no very important one, was not 
seldom palmed upon his employers for a good jest ; 
for example sake — " Walking yesterday morning casii-- 
ally down Snow Hill, who should we meet but Mr. 
Deputy Humphreys ! we rejoice to add that the worthy 
Deputy appeared to enjoy a good state of health. We 
do not remember ever to have see ft him look better.'''* 
This gentleman, so surprisingly met upon Snow Hill, 
from some peculiarities in gait or gesture, was a 
constant butt for mirth to the small paragraph- 
mongers of the day ; and our friend thought that he 
might have his fling at him with the rest. We met 
A. in Holborn shortly after this extraordinary ren- 
counter, which he told with tears of satisfaction in 
his eyes, and chuckling at the anticipated effects of 
its announcement next day in the paper. We did 
not quite comprehend where the wit of it lay at the 
time ; nor was it easy to be detected, when the thing 
came out, advantaged by type and letter-press. He 
had better have met any thing that morning than a 
Common Council Man. His services were shortly 
after dispensed with, on the plea that his paragraphs 
of late had been deficient in point. The one in 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 145 

question, it must be owned, had an air, in the open- 
ing especially, proper to awaken curiosity; and the 
sentiment, or moral, wears the aspect of humanity, 
and good neighbourly feeling. But somehow the 
conclusion was not judged altogether to answer to 
the magnificent promise of the premises. We traced 
our friend's pen afterwards in the '^ True Briton," 
the "Star," the " Traveller," — from all which he was 
successively dismissed, the Proprietors having " no 
further occasion for his services." Nothing was 
easier than to detect him. When wit failed, or 
topics ran low, there constantly appeared the follow- 
ing — ^^ It is not generally known that the three Blue 
Balls at the Paw nb lookers'' shops aj^e the ancient arms 
of Lonibardy. The Lombards 7ve7-e the first money- 
brokers in Europe^ Bob has done more to set the 
public right on this important point of blazonry, 
than the whole College of Heralds. 

The appointment of a regular wit has long ceased 
to be a part of the economy of a Morning Paper. 
Editors find their own jokes, or do as well without 
them. Parson Este, and Topham, brought up the 
set custom of "witty paragraphs" first in the 
"World." Boaden was a reigning paragraphist in 
his day, and succeeded poor Allen in the Oracle. 
But, as we said, the fashion of jokes passes away ; 
and it would be difficult to discover in the Biog- 
rapher of Mrs. Siddons, any traces of that vivacity 

10 



146 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

and fancy which charmed the whole town at the 
commencement of the present century. Even the 
prelusive delicacies of the present writer — the curt 
"Astraean allusion" — would be thought pedantic, 
and out of date, in these days. 

From the office of the Morning Post (for we may 
as well exhaust our Newspaper Reminiscences at 
once) by change of property in the paper, we were 
transferred, mortifying exchange ! to the office of 
the Albion Newspaper, late Rackstrow's Museum, in 
Fleet-street. What a transition — from a handsome 
apartment, from rose-wood desks, and silver-ink- 
stands, to an office — no office, but a den rather, 
but just redeemed from the occupation of dead 
monsters, of which it seemed redolent — from the 
centre of loyalty and fashion, to a focus of vulgarity 
and sedition ! Here in murky closet, inadequate 
from its square contents to the receipt of the two 
bodies of Editor, and humble paragraph-maker, 
together at one time, sat in the discharge of his 
new Editorial functions (the " Bigod " of Elia) the 
redoubted John Fenwick. 

F., without a guinea in his pocket, and having left 
not many in the pockets of his friends whom he 
might command, had purchased (on tick doubtless) 
the whole and sole Editorship, Proprietorship, with 
all the rights and titles (such as they were worth) of 
the Albion, from one Lovell ; of whom we know 



NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 1 47 

nothing, save that he had stood in the pillory for a 
libel on the Prince of Wales. With this hopeless 
concern — for it had been sinking ever since its 
commencement, and could now reckon upon not 
more than a hundred subscribers — F. resolutely de- 
termined upon pulling down the Government in the 
first instance, and making both our fortunes by way 
of corollary. For seven weeks and more did this 
infatuated Democrat go about borrowing seven shil- 
ling pieces, and lesser coin, to meet the daily de- 
mands of the Stamp Office, which allowed no credit 
to pubhcations of that side in politics. An outcast 
from politer bread, we attached our small talents to 
the forlorn fortunes of our friend. Our occupation 
now was to write treason. 

Recollections of feelings — which were all that 
now remained from our first boyish heats kindled by 
the French Revolution, when if we were misled, 
we erred in the company of some, who are ac- 
counted very good men now — rather than any ten- 
dency at this time to Republican doctrines — assisted 
us in assuming a style of writing, while the paper 
lasted, consonant in no very under tone to the right 
earnest fanaticism of F. Our cue was now to in- 
sinuate, rather than recommend, possible abdica- 
tions. Blocks, axes, Whitehall tribunals, were cov- 
ered with flowers of so cunning a periphrasis — as 
Mr, Bayes says, never naming the thing directly — 



148 NEWSPAPERS THIRTY-FIVE YEARS AGO. 

that the keen eye of an Attorney General was in- 
sufficient to detect the lurking snake among them. 
There were times, indeed, when we sighed for our 
more gentleman-like occupation under Stuart. But 
with change of masters it is ever change of service. 
Already one paragraph, and another, as we learned 
afterwards from a gentleman at the Treasury, had 
begun to be marked at that office, with a view of 
its being submitted at least to the attention of the 
proper Law Officers — when an unlucky, or rather 

lucky epigram from our pen, aimed a Sir J s 

M h, who was on the eve of departing for India 

to reap the fruits of his apostacy, as F. pronounced 
it, (it is hardly worth particularising), happening to 
oifend the nice sense of Lord, or, as he then de- 
lighted to be called. Citizen Stanhope, deprived F. 
at once of the last hopes of a guinea from the last 
patron that had stuck by us ; and breaking up our 
establishment, left us to the safe, but somewhat mor- 
tifying, neglect of the Crown Lawyers. — It was 
about this time, or a little earlier, that Dan Stuart 
made that curious confession to us, that he had 
" never deliberately walked into an Exhibition at 
Somerset House in his life." 



BARRENNESS OF THE IMAGINATIVE 
FACULTY IN THE PRODUCTIONS 
OF MODERN ART. 



Hogarth excepted, can we produce any one painter 
within the last fifty years, or since the humour of 
exhibiting began, that has treated a story imagina- 
tively ? By this we mean, upon whom his subject 
has so acted, that it has seemed to direct him — not 
to be arranged by him ? Any upon whom its leading 
or collateral points have impressed themselves so 
tyrannically, that he dared not treat it otherwise, 
lest he should falsify a revelation? Any that has 
imparted to his compositions, not merely so much 
truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness, 
but that individuahsing property, which should keep 
the subject so treated distinct in feature from every 
other subject, however similar, and to common ap- 
prehensions almost identical; so as that we might 
say, this and this part could have found an appro- 
priate place in no other picture in the world but 
this? Is there anything in modern art — we will 



150 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

not demand that it should be equal — but in any 
way analogous to what Titian has effected, in that 
wonderful bringing together of two times in the 
''Ariadne," in the National Gallery? Precipitous, 
with his reeling Satyr rout about him, re-peopling 
and re-illuming suddenly the waste places, drunk 
with a new fury beyond the grape, Bacchus, born in 
fire, fire-like flings .himself at the Cretan. This is 
the time present. With this telling of the story an 
artist, and no ordinary one, might remain richly 
proud. Guido, in his harmonious version of it, saw 
no further. But from the depths of the imaginative 
spirit Titian has recalled past time, and laid it con- 
tributory with the present to one simultaneous effect. 
With the desert all ringing with the mad cymbals of 
his followers, made lucid with the presence and new 
offers of a god, — as if unconscious of Bacchus, or 
but idly casting her eyes as upon some unconcern- 
ing pageant — her soul undistracted from Theseus — ■ 
Ariadne is still pacing the solitary shore, in as much 
heart-silence, and in almost the same local solitude, 
with which she awoke at day-break to catch the 
forlorn last glances of the sail that bore away the 
Athenian. 

Here are two points miraculously co-uniting ; fierce 
society, with the feeling of solitude still absolute ; 
noon-day revelations, with the accidents of the dull 
grey dawn unquenched and lingering; the present 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 151 

Bacchus, with the past Ariadne ; two stories, with 
double Time ; separate, and harmonising. Had the 
artist made the woman one shade less indiiferent to 
the God ; still more, had she expressed a rapture at 
his advent, where would have been the story of the 
mighty desolation of the heart previous? merged in 
the insipid accident of a flattering offer met with a 
welcome acceptance. The broken heart for Theseus 
was not hghtly to be pieced up by a God. 

We have before us a fine rough print, from a pic- 
ture by Raphael in the Vatican. It is the Presenta- 
tion of the new-born Eve to Adam by the Almighty. 
A fairer mother of mankind we might imagine, and a 
goodlier sire perhaps of men since born. But these 
are matters subordinate to the conception of the 
situation, displayed in this extraordinary production. 
A tolerably modern artist would have been satisfied 
with tempering certain raptures of connubial anticipa- 
tion, with a suitable acknowledgement to the Giver 
of the blessing, in the countenance of the first bride- 
groom ; something like the divided attention of the 
child (Adam was here a child man) between the 
given toy, and the mother who had just blest it 
with the bauble. This is the obvious, the first-sight 
view, the superficial. An artist of a higher grade, 
considering the awful presence they were in, would 
have taken care to subtract something from the ex- 
pression of the more human passion, and to heighten 



152 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. ^ 

the more spiritual one. This would be as much as 
an exhibition-goer, from the opening of Somerset 
House to last year's show, has been encouraged to 
look for. It is obvious to hint at a lower expression, 
yet in a pictuie, that for respects of drawing and 
colouring, might be deemed not wholly inadmissible 
within these art-fostering walls, in which the raptures 
should be as ninety-nine, the gratitude as one, or 
perhaps Zero ! By neither the one passion nor the 
other has Raphael expounded the situation of Adam. 
Singly upon his brow sits the absorbing sense of 
wonder at the created miracle. The moment is 
seized by the intuitive artist, perhaps not self-con- 
scious of his art, in which neither of the conflicting 
emotions — a moment how abstracted — have had 
time to spring up, or to battle for indecorous mas- 
tery. — We have seen a landscape of a justly ad- 
mired neoteric, in which he aimed at delineating a 
fiction, one of the most severely beautiful in an- 
tiquity — the gardens of the Hesperides. To do 

Mr. justice, he had painted a laudable orchard,' 

with fitting seclusion, and a veritable dragon (of 
which a Polypheme by Poussin is somehow a fac- 
simile for the situation), looking over into the world 
shut out backwards, so that none but a " still-climb- 
ing Hercules " could hope to catch a peep at the 
admired Ternary of Recluses. No conventual porter 
could keep his keys better than this custos with the 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 153 

" lidless eyes." He not only sees that none do in- 
trude into that privacy, but, as clear as daylight, 
that none but Hercules aut Diabolus by any manner 
of means can. So far all is well. We have absolute 
solitude here or nowhere. Ab extra the damsels are 
snug enough. But here the artist's courage seems 
to have failed him. He began to pity his pretty 
charge, and, to comfort the irksomenes's, has peopled 
their solitude with a bevy of fair attendants, maids 
of honour, or ladies of the bed-chamber, according 
to the approved etiquette at a court of the nine- 
teenth century; giving to the whole scene the air 
oid^fete champetre, if we will but excuse the absence 
of the gentlemen. This is well, and Watteauish. 
But what is become of the solitary mystery — the 

Daughters three, 
That sing around the golden tree ? 

This is not the way in which Poussin would have 
treated this subject. 

The paintings, or rather the stupendous architec- 
tural designs, of a modern artist, have been urged as 
objections to the theory of our motto. They are of 
a character, we confess, to stagger it. His towered 
structures are of the highest order of the material 
sublime. Whether they were dreams, or transcripts 
of some elder workmanship — Assyrian ruins old — 
restored by this mighty artist, they satisfy our most 



154 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

stretched and craving conceptions of the glories of 
the antique world. It is a pity that they were ever 
peopled. On that side, the imagination of the artist 
halts, and appears defective. Let us examine the 
point of the story in the '' Belshazzar's Feast." We 
will introduce it by an apposite anecdote. 

The court historians of the day record, that at 
the first dinner given by the late King (then Prince 
Regent) at the Pavilion, the following characteristic 
frolic was played off. The guests were select and 
admiring ; the banquet profuse and admirable ; the 
lights lustrous and oriental ; the eye was perfectly 
dazzled with the display of plate, among which the 
great gold salt-cellar, brought from the regalia in the 
Tower for this especial purpose, itself a tower ! stood 
conspicuous for its magnitude. And now the Rev. 
* * * * the then admired court Chaplain, was pro- 
ceeding with the grace, when, at a signal given, the 
lights were suddenly overcast, and a huge transparency 
was discovered, in which glittered in golden letters — 

" Brighton — Earthquake — Swallow- up- 
alive ! " 

Imagine the confusion of the guests ; the Georges 
and garters, jewels, bracelets, moulted upon the occa- 
sion ! The fans dropt, and picked up the next morn- 
ing by the sly court pages 1 Mrs. Fitz-what 's-her- 
name fainting, and the Countess of * * * * holding 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 155 

the smelling bottle, till the good humoured Prince 
caused harmony to be restored by calling in fresh 
candles, and declaring that the whole was nothing 
but a pantomime hoax^ got up by the ingenious Mr. 
Farley, of Covent Garden, from hints which his Royal 
Highness himself had furnished ! Then imagine 
the infinite applause that followed, the mutual rally- 
ings, the declarations that " they were not much 
frightened," of the assembled galaxy. 

The point of time in the picture exactly answers 
to the appearance of the transparency in the anec- 
dote. The huddle, the flutter, the bustle, the es- 
cape, the alarm, and the mock alarm ; the prettinesses 
heightened by consternation ; the courtier's fear 
which was flattery, and the lady's which was afl'ecta- 
tion ; all that we may conceive to have taken place 
in a mob of Brighton courtiers, sympathising with the 
well-acted surprise of their sovereign ; all this, and 
no more, is exhibited by the well-dressed lords and 
ladies in the Hall of Belus. Just this sort of con- 
sternation we have seen among a flock of disquieted 
wild geese at the report only of a gun having gone 
ofl"! 

But is this vulgar fright, this mere animal anxiety 
for the preservation of their persons, — such as we 
have witnessed at a theatre, when a slight alarm of 
fire has been given — an adequate exponent of a 
supernatural terror? the way in which the finger of 



156 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

God, writing judgments, would have been met by the 
withered conscience? There is a human fear, and a 
divine fear. Tlie one is disturbed, restless, and bent 
upon escape. The other is bowed down, effortless, 
passive. When the spirit appeared before Eliphaz in 
the visions of the night, and the hair of his flesh stood 
up, was it in the thoughts of the Temanite to ring the 
bell of his chamber^ or to call up the servants? But 
let us see in the text what there is to justify all this 
huddle of vulgar consternation. 

From the words of Daniel it appears that Belshazzar 
had made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and 
drank wine before the thousand. The golden and 
silver vessels are gorgeously enumerated, with the 
princes, the king's concubines, and his wives. Then 
follows — 

" In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's 
hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon 
the plaster of the wall of the king's palace ; and the 
king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the 
king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts 
troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were 
loosened, and his knees smote one against another." 

This is the plain text. By no hint can it be other- 
wise inferred, but that the appearance was solely con- 
fined to the fancy of Belshazzar, that his single brain 
was troubled. Not a word is spoken of its being seen 
by any else there present, not even by the queen her- 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 157 

self, who merely undertakes for the interpretation of 
the phenomenon, as related to her, doubtless, by her 
husband. The lords are simply said to be astonished ; 
/. e. at the trouble and the change of countenance in 
their sovereign. Even the prophet does not appear 
to have seen the scroll, which the king saw. He 
recalls it only, as Joseph did the Dream to the King 
of Egypt. " Then was the part of the hand sent from 
him [the Lord], and this writing was written." He 
speaks of the phantasm as past. 

Then what becomes of this needless multiplication 
of the miracle? this message to a royal conscience, 
singly expressed — for it was said, " thy kingdom is 
divided," — simultaneously impressed upon the fan- 
cies of a thousand courtiers, who were imphed in it 
neither directly nor grammatically? 

But admitting the artist's own version of the story, 
and that the sight was seen also by the thousand 
courtiers — let it have been visible to all Babylon — 
as the knees of Belshazzar were shaken, and his 
countenance troubled, even so would the knees of 
every man in Babylon, and their countenances, as of 
an individual man, been troubled ; bowed, bent down, 
so would they have remained, stupor-fixed, with no 
thought of struggling with that inevitable judgment. 

Not all that is optically possible to be seen, is to 
be shown in every picture. The eye delightedly 
dwells upon the brilliant individualities in a " Marriage 



158 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

at Cana," by Veronese, or Titian, to the very texture 
and colour of the wedding garments, the ring glitter- 
ing upon the bride's fingers, the metal and fashion of 
the wine pots ; for at such seasons there is leisure and 
luxury to be curious. But in a " day of judgment," or 
in a "day of lesser horrors, yet divine," as at the im- 
pious feast of Belshazzar, the eye should see, as the 
actual eye of an agent or patient in the immediate 
scene would see, only in masses and indistinction. 
Not only the female attire and jewelry exposed to the 
critical eye of the fashion, as minutely as the dresses 
in a lady's magazine, in the criticised picture, — but 
perhaps the curiosities of anatomical science, and 
studied diversities of posture in the falling angels and 
sinners of Michael Angelo, — have no business in 
their great subjects. There was no leisure of them. 

By a wise falsification, the great masters of painting 
got at their true conclusions ; by not showing the 
actual appearances, that is, all that was to be seen at 
any given moment by an indifferent eye, but only 
what the eye might be supposed to see in the doing 
or sufTering of some portentous action. Suppose the 
moment of the swallowing up of Pompeii. There 
they were to be seen — houses, columns, architectural 
proportions, differences of public and private build- 
ings, men and women at their standing occupations, 
the diversified thousand postures, attitudes, dresses, 
in some confusion truly, but physically they were 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 159 

visible. But what eye saw them at that edipsing 
moment, wiiich reduces confusion to a kind of unity, 
and when the senses are upturned from their pro- 
prieties, when sight and hearing are a feeling only? 
A thousand years have passed, and we are at leisure 
to contemplate the weaver fixed standing at his 
shuttle, the baker at his oven, and to turn over with 
antiquarian coolness the pots and pans of Pompeii. 

" Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeah, and thou. 
Moon, in the valley of Ajalon." Who, in reading 
this magnificent Hebraism, in his conception, sees 
aught but the heroic sun of Nun, with the out- 
stretched arm, and the greater and lesser hght obse- 
quious? Doubtless there were to be seen hill and 
dale, and chariots and horsemen, on open plain, or 
winding by secret defiles, and all the circumstances 
and stratagems of war. But whose eyes would have 
been conscious of this array at the interposition of 
the synchronic miracle? Yet in the picture of this 
subject by the artist of the " Belshazzar's Feast " — no 
ignoble work either — the marshalling and landscape 
of the war is everything, the miracle sinks into an 
anecdote of the day ; and the eye may '' dart through 
rank and file traverse " for some minutes, before it 
shall discover, among his armed followers, which is 
Joshua ! Not modern art alone, but ancient, where 
only it is to be found if anywhere, can be detected 
erring, from defect of this imaginative faculty. The 



l60 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

world has nothing to show of the preternatural in 
painting, transcending the figure of Lazarus bursting 
his grave-clothes, in the great picture at Angerstein's. 
It seems a thing between two beings. A ghastly 
horror at itself struggles with newly-apprehending 
gratitude at second life bestowed. It cannot forget 
that it was a ghost. It has hardly felt that it is a 
body. It has to tell of the world of spirits. — Was it 
from a feeling, that the crowd of half-impassioned 
by-standers, and the still more irrelevant herd of 
passers-by at a distance, who have not heard or but 
faintly have been told of the passing miracle, ad- 
mirable as they are in design and hue — for it is 
a glorified work — do not respond adequately to the 
action — that the single figure of the Lazarus has 
been attributed to Michael Angelo, and the mighty 
Sebastian unfairly robbed of the fame of the greater 
half of the interest? Now that there were not in- 
different passers-by within actual scope of the eyes 
of those present at the miracle, to whom the sound 
of it had but faintly, or not at all, reached, it would 
be hardihood to deny ; but would they see them ? or 
can the mind in the conception of it admit of such 
unconcerning objects? can it think of them at all? 
or what associating league to the imagination can 
there be between the seers, and the seers not, of a 
presential miracle? 
Were an artist to paint upon demand a picture of 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. l6l 

a Dryad, we will ask whether, in the present low state 
of expectation, the patron would not, or ought not to 
be fully satisfied with a beautiful naked figure re- 
cumbent under wide-stretched oaks ? Disseat those 
woods, and place the same figure among fountains, 
and falls of pellucid water, and you have a — Naiad ! 
Not so in a rough print we have seen after Julio 
Romano, we think — for it is long since — thei-e, by 
no process, with mere change of scene, could the 
figure have reciprocated characters. Long, grotesque, 
fantastic, yet with a grace of her own, beautiful in 
convolution and distortion, linked to her connatural 
tree, co -twisting with its limbs her own, till both 
seemed either — these, animated branches; those, 
disanimated members — yet the animal and vege- 
table lives sufficiently kept distinct — his Dryad lay 
— an approximation of two natures, which to con- 
ceive, it must be seen ; analogous to, not the same 
with, the delicacies of Ovidian transformations. 

To the lowest subjects, and, to a superficial com- 
prehension, the most barren, the Great Masters gave 
loftiness and fruitfulness. The large eye of genius 
saw in the meanness of present objects their capa- 
bilities of treatment from their relations to some grand 
Past or Future. How has Raphael — we must still 
linger about the Vatican — treated the humble craft 
of the ship-builder, in his "Building of the Ark?" 
It is in that scriptural series, to which we have re- 

II 



l62 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

ferred, and which, judging from some fine rough old 
graphic sketches of them which we possess, seem to 
be of a higher and more poetic grade than even the 
Cartoons. The dim of sight are the timid and the 
shrinking. There is a cowardice in modern art. As 
the Frenchmen, of whom Coleridge's friend made 
the prophetic guess at Rome, from the beard and 
horns of the Moses of Michael Angelo collected no 
inferences beyond that of a He Goat and a Cornuto ; 
so from this subject, of mere mechanic promise, it 
would instinctively turn away, as from one incapable 
of investiture with any grandeur. The dock-yards at 
Woolwich would object derogatory associations. The 
depot at Chatham would be the mote and the beam 
in its intellectual eye. But not to the nautical prep- 
arations in the ship-yards of Civita Vecchia did 
Raphael look for instructions, when he imagined the 
Building of the Vessel that was to be conservatory of 
the wrecks of the species of drowned mankind. In 
the intensity of the action, he keeps ever out of sight 
the meanness of the operation. There is the Patri- 
arch, in calm forethought, and with holy prescience, 
giving directions. And there are his agents — ■ the 
solitary but sufficient Three — hewing, sawing, every 
one with the might and earnestness of a Demiurgus ; 
under- some instinctive rather than technical guidance ; 
giant-muscled ; every one a Hercules, or liker to 
those Vulcanian Three, that in sounding caverns 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 163 

under Mongibello wrought in fire — Brontes, and 
black Steropes, and Pyracmon. So work the work- 
men that should repair a world ! 

Artists again err in the confounding of poetic with 
pictorial subjects. In the latter, the exterior accidents 
are nearly everything, the unseen qualities as nothing. 
Othello's colour — the infirmities and corpulence of a 
Sir John Falstaff — do they haunt us perpetually in 
the reading ? or are they obtruded upon our concep- 
tions one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in 
admiration at the respective moral or intellectual 
attributes of the character ? But in a picture Othello 
is always a Blackamoor ; and the other only Plump 
Jack. Deeply corporealised, and enchained hope- 
lessly in the grovelling fetters of externaUty, must be 
the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image 
of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote — the 
errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by 
eclipse — has never presented itself, divested from 
the unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a 
rabblement at the heels of Rosinante. That man has 
read his book by halves ; he has laughed, mistaking 
his author's purport, which was — tears. The artist 
that pictures Quixote (and it is in this degrading 
point that he is every season held up at our Exhibi- 
tions) in the shallow hope of exciting mirth, would 
have joined the rabble at the heels of his starved 
steed. We wish not to see that counterfeited, which 



l64 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

we would not have wished to see in the reality. Con- 
scious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, whoj 
on hearing that his withered person was passing, 
would have stepped over his threshold to gaze upon 
his forlorn habiliments, and the " strange bed-fellows 
which misery brings a man acquainted with? " Shade 
of Cervantes ! who in thy Second Part could put into 
the mouth of thy Quixote those high aspirations of 
a super-chivalrous gallantry, where he replies to one 
of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would 
spoil their pretty net-works, and inviting him to be 
a guest with them, in accents like these : " Truly, 
fairest Lady, Actaeon was not more astonished when 
he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, than I 
have been in beholding your beauty : I commend the 
manner of your pastime, and thank you for your kind 
offers ; and, if I may serve you, so I may be sure you 
will be obeyed, you may command me : for my pro- 
fession is this. To shew myself thankful, and a doer 
of good to all sorts of people, especially of the rank 
that your person shows you to be ; and if those nets, 
as they take up but a little piece of ground, should 
take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds 
to pass through, rather than break them : and (he 
adds,) that you may give credit to this my exaggera- 
tion, behold at least he that promiseth you this, is 
Don Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath 
come to your hearing." Illustrious Romancer ! were 



ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 165 

the *' fine frenzies," which possessed the brain of thy 
own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this Second Part, to 
be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men ? 
to be monstered, and shown up at the heartless ban- 
quets of great men? Was that pitiable infirmity, 
which in thy First Part misleads him, always from 
within, into half- ludicrous, but more than half-com- 
passionable and admirable errors, not infliction enough 
from heaven, that men by studied artifices must devise 
and practise upon the humour, to inflame where they 
should soothe it ? Why, Goneril would have blushed 
to practise upon the abdicated king at this rate, and 
the she-wolf Regan not have endured to play the 
pranks upon his fled wits, which thou hast made thy 
Quixote suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands 
of that unworthy nobleman.* 

In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art 
of the most consummate artist in the Book way that 
the world hath yet seen, to keep up in the mind of 
the reader the heroic attributes of the character with- 
out relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer 
no alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. 
If it ever obtrudes itself as a disharmony, are we 
inclined to laugh ; or not, rather, to indulge a con- 
trary emotion ? — Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the 
reUsh with which his Reading Public had received 

* Yet from this Second Part, our cried-up pictures are 
mostly selected; the waiting-women with beards, &c. 



l66 ON THE PRODUCTIONS OF MODERN ART. 

the fooleries of the man, more to their palates than 
the generosities of the master, in the sequel let his pen 
run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and sacri- 
ficed a great idea to the taste of his contemporaries. 
We know that in the present day the Knight has 
fewer admirers than the Squire. Anticipating, what 
did actually happen to him — as afterwards it did to 
his scarce inferior follower, the Author of " Guzman 
de Alfarache " — that some less knowing hand would 
prevent him by a spurious Second Part : and judging, 
that it would be easier for his competitor to out-bid 
him in the comicalities, than in the rotnance, of his 
work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set 
up the Squire for his Hero. For what else has he 
unsealed the eyes of Sancho; and instead of that 
twilight state of semi -insanity — the madness at 
second-hand — the contagion, caught from a stronger 
mind infected — that war between native cunning, 
and hereditary deference, with which he has hitherto 
accompanied his master — two for a pair almost — ■ 
does he substitute a downright Knave, with open 
eyes, for his own ends only following a confessed 
Madman ; and offering at one time to lay, if not 
actually laying, hands upon him 1 From the moment 
that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is be- 
come a — treatable lunatic. Our artists handle him 
accordingly. 



REJOICINGS UPON THE NEW YEAR'S 
COMING OF AGE. 



The Old Year being dead, and the New Year 
coming of age, which he does, by Calendar Law, as 
soon as the breath is out of the old gentleman's body, 
nothing would serve the young spark but he must 
give a dinner upon the occasion, to which all the 
Days in the year were invited. The Festivals, whom 
he deputed as his stewards, were mightily taken with 
the notion. They had been engaged time out of 
mind, they said, in providing mirth and good cheer 
for mortals below ; and it was time they should have 
a taste of their own bounty. It was stiffly debated 
among them, whether the Fasts should be admitted. 
Some said, the appearance of such lean, starved 
guests, with their mortified faces, would pervert the 
ends of the meeting. But the objection was over- 
ruled by Christmas Day, who had a design upon Ash 
Wednesday (as you shall hear), and a mighty desire 
to see how the old Dominie would behave himself iu 



1 68 REJOICINGS UPON 

his cups. Only the Vigils were requested to come 
with their lanterns, to light the gentlefolks home at 
night. 

All the Days came to their day. Covers were pro- 
vided for three hundred and sixty- five guests at the 
principal table ; with an occasional knife and fork at 
the side-board for the Twenty-Ninth of February. 

I should have told you, that cards of invitation had 
been issued. The carriers were the Hoitrs ; twelve 
little, merry, whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire 
to see, that went all round, and found out the persons 
invited well enough, with the exception of Easter 
Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such Moveables who 
had lately shifted their quarters. 

Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all 
sorts of Days, and a rare din they made of it. There 
was nothing but, Hail ! fellow Day, — well met — 
brother Day — sister Day, — only Lady Day kept a 
little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. 
Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for 
she came in a tiffany suit, white and gold, like a 
queen on a frost- cake, all royal, glittering, and Epi- 
phanous. The rest came, some in green, some in 
white — but old Lent and his family were not yet 
out of -mourning. Rainy Days came in, dripping; 
and sun-shiny Days helped them to change their 
stockings. Wedding Day was there in his marriage 
finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay Day came 



THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 1 69 

late, as he always does ; and Doomsday sent word — 
he might be expected. 

April Fool (as my young lord's jester) took upon 
himself to marshal the guests, and wild work he made 
with it. It would have posed old Erra Pater to have 
found out any given Day in the year, to erect a 
scheme upon — good Days, bad Days, were so 
shuffled together, to the confounding of all sober 
horoscopy. 

He had stuck the Twenty First of June next to 
the Twenty Second of December, and the former 
looked like a Maypole siding a marrow-bone. Ash 
Wednesday got wedged in (as was concerted) be- 
twixt Christinas and Lord Mayor's Days. Lord ! 
how he laid about him ! Nothing but barons of beef 
and turkeys would go down with him — to the great 
greasing and detriment of his new sackcloth bib and 
tucker. And still Christmas DayyvdiS at his elbow, 
plying him with the wassail-bowl, till he roared, and 
hiccup'd, and protested there was no faith in dried 
ling, but commended it to the devil for a sour, windy, 
acrimonious, censorious, hy-po-crit-crit-critical mess, 
and no dish for a gentleman. Then he dipt his fist 
into the middle of the great custard that stood before 
his left-hand neighbour, and daubed his hungry beard 
all over with it, till you would have taken him for the 
Last Day in December, it so hung in icicles. 

At another part of the table, Shrove Tuesday was 



I/O REJOICINGS UPON 

helping the Second of September to some cock broth, 
— which courtesy the latter returned with the deli- 
cate thigh of a hen pheasant — so there was no love 
lost for that matter. The Last of Lent was spunging 
upon Shrovetide' s pancakes ; which April Fool per- 
ceiving, told him he did well, for pancakes were 
proper to a good fry-day. 

In another part, a hubbub arose about the Thirtieth 
of fanuary, who, it seems, being a sour puritanic char- 
acter, that thought nobody's meat good or sanctified 
enough for him, had smuggled into the room a calf's 
head, which he had had cooked at home for that pur- 
pose, thinking to feast thereon incontinently ; but as 
it lay in the dish, March ?nanyweathers, who is a very 
fine lady,- and subject to the megrims, screamed out 
there was a "human head in the platter," and raved 
about Herodias' daughter to that degree, that the 
obnoxious viand was obliged to be removed ; nor did 
she recover her stomach till she had gulped down a 
Restorative, confected of Oak Apple, which the merry 
Twenty Ninth of May always carries about with him 
for that purpose. 

The King's health * being called for after this, a 
notable dispute arose between the Twelfth of Atigust 
(a zealous old Whig gentlewoman,) and the Twenty 
Third of April (a new-fangled lady of the Tory 
stamp,) as to which of them should have the honour 

* The late King. 



THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. ijl 

to propose it. August grew hot upon the matter, 
affirming time out of mind the prescriptive right to 
have lain with her, till her rival had basely sup- 
planted her ; whom she represented as little better 
than a kept mistress, who went about mfine clothes, 
while she (the legitimate Birthday) had scarcely a 
rag, &c. 

April Fool, being made mediator, confirmed the 
right in the strongest form of words to the appellant, 
but decided for peace' sake that the exercise of it 
should remain with the present possessor. At the 
same time, he slyly rounded the first lady in the ear, 
that an action might lie against the Crown for bi-geny. 

It beginning to grow a little duskish, Candlemas 
lustily bawled out for hghts, which was opposed by 
all the Days, who protested against burning daylight. 
Then fair water was handed round in silver ewers, 
and the same lady was observed to take an unusual 
time in Washing herself. 

May Day, with that sweetness which is peculiar to 
her, in a neat speech proposing the health of the 
founder, crowned her goblet (and by her example 
the rest of the company) with garlands. This being 
done, the lordly New Year from the upper end of the 
table, in a cordial but somewhat lofty tone, returned 
thanks. He felt proud on an occasion of meeting 
so many of his worthy father's late tenants, promised 
to improve their farms, and at the same time to 



172 REJOICINGS UPON 

abate (if anything was found unreasonable) in their 
rents. 

At the mention of this, the four Quarter Days 
involuntarily looked at each other, and smiled ; 
April Fool whistled to an old tune of '' New Brooms ; " 
and a surly old rebel at the farther end of the table 
(who was discovered to be no other than the Fifth 
of November,) muttered out, distinctly enough to 
be heard by the whole company, words to this effect, 
that, " when the old one is gone, he is a fool that 
looks for a better." Which rudeness of his, the 
guests resenting, unanimously voted his expulsion ; 
and the male-content was thrust out neck and heels 
into the cellar, as the properest place for such a 
boutefeu and firebrand as he had shown himself 
to be. 

Order being restored — the young lord (who to 
say truth, had been a little ruffled, and put beside 
his oratory) in as few, and yet as obliging words as 
possible, assured them of entire welcome ; and, with 
a graceful turn, singling out poor Twenty ninth of 
Feb7'uary, that had sate all this while mum-chance 
at the side-board, begged to couple his health with 
that of the good company before him — which he 
drank accordingly; observing, that he had not seen 
his honest face any time these four years, with a 
number of endearing expressions besides. At the 
same time, removing the solitary Day from the for- 



THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 173 

lorn seat which had been assigned him, he stationed 
him at his own board, somewhere between the Greek 
Calends and Latter Lammas. 

Ash Wednesday, being now called upon for a song, 
with his eyes fast stuck in his head, and as well as 
the Canary he had swallowed would give him leave, 
struck up a Carol which Christmas Day had taught 
him for the nonce ; and was followed by the latter, 
who gave " Miserere " in fine style, hitting off the 
mumping notes and lengthened drawl of Old Morti- 
fication with infinite humour. April Fool swore they 
had exchanged conditions : but Good Friday was 
observed to look extremely grave ; and Sunday held 
her fan before her face, that she might not be seen 
to smile. 

Shrove-tide, Lord Mayor's Day, and April Fool, 
next joined in a glee — 

Which is the properest day to drink? 

in which all the Days chiming in, made a merry 
burden. 

They next fell to quibbles and conundrums. The 
question being proposed, who had the greatest 
number of followers — the Quarter Days said, there 
could be no question as to that; for they had all 
the creditors in the world dogging their heels. But 
April Fool gave it in favour of the Fo7'ty Days befoi-e 
Easter; because the debtors in all cases outnum- 



1/4 REJOICINGS UPON 

bered the creditors, and they kept lent all the 
year. 

All this while, Valentine's Day kept courting 'pretty 
May'^ who sate next him, slipping amorous billets- 
doux under the table, till the Dog Days (who are 
naturally of a warm constitution) began to be jealous, 
and to bark and rage exceedingly. April Fool, who 
likes a bit of sport above measure, and had some 
pretensions to the lady besides, as being but a 
cousin once removed, — clapped and halloo'd them 
on; and as fast as their indignation cooled, those 
mad wags, the Ember Days, were at it with their 
bellows, to blow it into a flame ; and all was in a 
ferment : till old Madam Septuagesima (who boasts 
herself the Mother of the Days) wisely diverted the 
conversation with a tedious tale of the lovers which 
she could reckon when she was young ; and of one 
Master Rogation Day in particular, who was for ever 
putting the question to her ; but she kept him at 
a distance, as the chronicle would tell — by which 
I apprehend she meant the Almanack. Then she 
rambled on to the Days that were gone, the good old 
Days, and so to the Days before the Flood — which 
plainly showed her old head to be little better than 
crazed and doited. 

Day being ended, the Days called for their cloaks 
and great coats, and took their leaves. Lo7'd Mayor's 
Day went off in a Mist, as usual ; Shortest Day in a 



THE NEW YEAR'S COMING OF AGE. 175 

deep black Fog, that wrapt the httle gentleman all 
round like a hedge-hog. Two Vigils — so watchmen 
are called in heaven — saw Christmas Day safe 
home — they had been used to the business before. 
Another Vigil — a stout, sturdy patrole, called the 
Eve of Si. Christopher — seeing Ash Wednesday in 
a condition little better than he should be — e'en 
whipt him over his shoulders, pick-a-back fashion, 
and Old Mortification went floating home, singing — 

On the bat's back do I fly, 

and a number of old snatches besides, between drunk 
and sober, but very few Aves or Penitentiaries (you 
may believe me) were among them. Longest Day 
set off westward in beautiful crimson and gold — 
the rest, some in one fashion, some in another ; but 
Valentine and ^'pretty May took their departure to- 
gether in one of the prettiest silvery twilights a 
Lover's Day could wish to set in. 



THE WEDDING. 



I DO not know when I have been better pleased than 
at being invited last week to be present at the wed- 
ding of a friend's daughter. I like to make one at 
these ceremonies, which to us old people give back 
our youth in a manner, and restore our gayest sea- 
son, in the remembrance of our own success, or the 
regrets, scarcely less tender, of our own youthful dis- 
appointments, in this point of a settlement. On 
these occasions I am sure to be in good-humour for 
a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honey- 
moon. Being without a family, I am flattered with 
these temporary adoptions into a friend's family ; I 
feel a sort of cousinhood, or uncleship, for the sea- 
son ; I am inducted into degrees of affinity ; and, 
in the participated socialities of the little community, 
I lay down for a brief while my solitary bachelor- 
ship. I carry this humour so far, that I take it un- 
kindly to be left out, even when a funeral is going 
on in the house of a dear friend. But to my 
subject. 



THE WEDDING. 



1 77 



The union itself had been long settled, but its 
celebration had been hitherto deferred, to an almost 
unreasonable state of suspense in the lovers, by some 
invincible prejudices which the bride's father had 
unhappily contracted upon the subject of the too 
early marriages of females. He has been lecturing 
any time these five years — for to that length the 
courtship has been protracted — upon the propriety 
of putting off the solemnity, till the lady should have 
completed her five and twentieth year. We all be- 
gan to be afraid that a suit, which as yet had abated 
of none of its ardours, might at last be lingered on, 
till passion had time to cool, and love go out in the 
experiment. But a little wheedling on the part of 
his wife, who was by no means a party to these over- 
strained notions, joined to some serious expostula- 
tions on that of his friends, who, from the growing 
infirmities of the old gentleman, could not promise 
ourselves many years' enjoyment of his company, 
and were anxious to bring matters to a conclusion 
during his life-time, at length prevailed'; and on 
Monday last the daughter of my old friend. Admiral 
• having attained the womanly age of nine- 
teen, was conducted to the church by her pleasant 
cousin J — — , who told some few years older. 

Before the youthful part of my female readers 
express their indignation at the abominable loss of 
time occasioned to the lovers by the preposterous 

12 



178 THE WEDDING. 

notions of my old friend, they will do well to con- 
sider the reluctance which a fond parent naturally 
feels at parting with his child. To this unwillingness, 
I believe, in most cases may be traced the difference 
of opinion on this point between child and parent, 
whatever pretences of interest or prudence may be 
held out to cover it. The hardheartedness of fathers 
is a fine theme for romance writers, a sure and mov- 
ing topic ; but is there not something untender, to 
say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child 
is sometimes in to tear herself from the parental 
stock, and commit herself to strange graftings? The 
case is heightened where the lady, as in the present 
instance, happens to be an only child. I do not 
understand these matters experimentally, but I can 
make a shrewd guess at the wounded pride of a 
parent upon these occasions. It is no new ob- 
servation, I believe, that a lover in most cases has 
no rival so much to be feared as the father. Cer- 
tainly there is a jealousy in tniparalkl subjects, which 
is little less heart-rending than the passion which 
we more strictly christen by that name. Mothers' 
scruples are more easily got over ; for this reason, I 
suppose, that the protection transferred to a hus- 
band is less a derogation and a loss to their au- 
thority than to the paternal. Mothers, besides, 
have a trembling foresight, which paints the incon- 
veniences (impossible to be conceived in the same 



THE WEDDING. 179 

degree by the other parent) of a life of forlorn 
celibacy, which the refusal of a tolerable match may 
entail upon their child. Mothers' instinct is a surer 
guide here, than the cold reasonings of a father on 
such a topic. To this instinct may be imputed, and 
by it alone may be excused, the unbeseeming arti- 
fices, by which some wives push on the matrimonial 
projects of their daughters, which the husband, how- 
ever approving, shall entertain with comparative in- 
difference. A little shamelessness on this head is 
pardonable. With this explanation, forwardness be- 
comes a grace, and maternal importunity receives 
the name of a virtue. — But the parson stays, while 
I preposterously assume his office ; I am preaching, 
while the bride is on the threshold. 

Nor let any of my female readers suppose that the 
sage reflections which have just escaped me have the 
obliquest tendency of application to the young lady, 
who, it will be seen, is about to venture upon a 
change in her condition, at a mature and competent 
age, and not without the fullest approbation of all 
parties. I only deprecate very hasty marriages. 

It had been fixed that the ceremony should be 
gone through at an early hour, to give time for a 
little dejeune afterwards, to which a select party of 
friends had been invited. We were in church a litde 
before the clock struck eight. 

Nothing could be more judicious or graceful than 



l80 THE WEDDING. 

the dress of the bride-maids — the three charming 
Miss Foresters — on this morning. To give the 
bride an opportunity of shining singly, they had 
come habited all in green. I am ill at describing 
female apparel ; but, while she stood at the altar in 
vestments white and candid as her thoughts, a sacri- 
ficial whiteness, they assisted in robes, such as might 
become Diana's nymphs — Foresters indeed — as 
such who had not yet come to the resolution of 
putting off cold virginity. These young maids, not 
being so blest as to have a mother living, I am told, 
keep single for their father's sake, and live all to- 
gether so happy with their remaining parent, that 
the hearts of their lovers are ever broken with the 
prospect (so inauspicious to their hopes) of such 
uninterrupted and provoking home-comfort. '^ Gal- 
lant girls I each a victim worthy of Iphigenia ! 

I do not know what business I have to be present 
in solemn places. I cannot divest me of an unsea- 
sonable disposition to levity upon the most awful 
occasions. I was never cut out for a public func- 
tionary. Ceremony and I have long shaken hands ; 
but I could not resist the importunities of the young 
lady's father, whose gout unhappily confined him 
at honie, to act as parent on this occasion, and give 
away the bride. Something ludicrous occurred to 
me at this most serious of all moments — a sense of 
my unfitness to have the disposal, even in imagina- 



THE WEDDING. i8l 

tion, of the sweet young creature beside me. I 
fear I was betrayed to some lightness, for the awful 
eye of the parson — and the rector's eye of Saint 
Mildred's in the Poultry is no trifle of a rebuke — 
was upon me in an instant, souring my incipient 
jest to the tristful severities of a funeral. 

This was the only misbehaviour which I can plead 
to upon this solemn occasion, unless what was ob- 
jected to me after the ceremony by one of the 

handsome Miss T :s, be accounted a solecism. 

She was pleased to say that she had never seen a 
gentleman before me give away a bride in black. 
Now black has been my ordinary apparel so long 
— indeed I take it to be the proper costume of an 
author — the stage sanctions it — that to have ap- 
peared in some lighter colour would have raised 
more mirth at my expense, than the anomaly had 
created censure. But I could perceive that the 
bride's mother, and some elderly ladies present (God 
bless them !) would have been well content, if I had 
come in any other colour than that. But I got over 
the omen by a lucky apologue, which I remembered 
out of Pilpay, or some Indian author, of all the birds 
being invited to the linnets' wedding, at which, when 
all the rest came in their gayest feathers, the raven 
alone apologised for his cloak because " he had no 
other." This tolerably reconciled the elders. But 
with the young people all was merriment, and shak- 



1 82 THE WEDDING. 

ings of hands, and congratulations, and kissing away 
the bride's tears, and kissings from her in return, till 
a young lady, who assumed some experience in these 
matters, having worn the nuptial bands some four or 
five weeks longer than her friend, rescued her, archly 
observing, with half an eye upon the bridegroom, 
that at this rate she would have '^none left." 

My friend the admiral was in fine wig and buckle 
on this occasion — a striking contrast to his usual 
neglect of personal appearance. He did not once 
shove up his borrowed locks (his custom ever at his 
morning studies) to betray the few gray stragglers 
of his own beneath them. He wore an aspect of 
thoughtful satisfaction. I trembled for the hour, 
which at length approached, when after a protracted 
breakfast of three hours — if stores of cold fowls, 
tongues, hams, botargoes, dried fruits, wines, cor- 
dials, &c., can deserve so meagre an appellation — 
the coach was announced, which was come to carry 
off the bride and bridegroom for a season, as custom 
has sensibly ordained, into the country ; upon which 
design, wishing them a feHcitous journey, let us re- 
turn to the assembled guests. 

■ As when a well-graced actor leaves the stage. 
The eyes of men 
Are idly bent on him that eaters next, 

so idly did we bend our eyes upon one another, 
when the chief performers in the morning's pageant 



THE WEDDING. 1 83 

had vanished. None told his tale. None sipt her 
glass. The poor Admiral made an effort — it was 
not much. I had anticipated so far. Even the 
infinity of full satisfaction, that had betrayed itself 
through the prim looks and quiet deportment of his 
lady, began to wane into something of misgiving. 
No one knew whether to take their leaves or stay. 
We seemed assembled upon a silly occasion. In 
this crisis, betwixt tarrying and departure, I must 
do justice to a foolish talent of mine, which had 
otherwise like to have brought me into disgrace in 
the fore-part of the day; I mean a power, in any 
emergency, of thinking and giving vent to all manner 
of strange nonsense. In this awkward dilemma I 
found it sovereign. I rattled off some of my most 
excellent absurdities. All were willing to be relieved, 
at any expense of reason, from the pressure of the 
intolerable vacuum which had succeeded to the 
morning bustle. By this means I was fortunate in 
keeping together the better part of the company to 
a late hour : and a rubber of whist (the Admiral's 
favourite game) with some rare strokes of chance 
as well as skill, which came opportunely on his side 
— lengthened out till midnight — dismissed the old 
gentleman at last to his bed with comparatively easy 
spirits. 

I have been at my old friend's various times since. 
I do not know a visiting place where every guest 



1 84 THE WEDDING. 

is so perfectly at his ease ; nowhere, where harmony 
is so strangely the result of confusion. Every body is 
at cross purposes, yet the effect is so much better 
than uniformity. Contradictory orders; servants 
pulling one way ; master and mistress driving some 
other, yet both diverse ; visitors huddled up in cor- 
ners ; chairs unsymmetrised : candles disposed by 
chance ; meals at odd hours, tea and supper at 
once, or the latter preceding the former; the host 
and the guest conferring, yet each upon a different 
topic, each understanding himself, neither trying to 
understand or hear the other ; draughts and politics, 
chess and political economy, cards and conversation 
on nautical matters, going on at once, without the 
hope, or indeed the wish, of distinguishing them, 
make it altogether the most perfect concordia discors 
you shall meet with. Yet somehow the old house 
is not quite what it should be. The Admiral still 
enjoys his pipe, but he has no Miss Emily to fill it 
for him. The instrument stands where it stood, but 
she is gone, whose delicate touch could sometimes 
for a short minute appease the warring elements. 
He has learnt, as Marvel expresses it, to " make his 
destiny his choice." He bears bravely up, but he 
does not come out with his flashes of wild wit so 
thick as formerly. His sea songs seldomer escape 
him. His wife, too, looks as if she wanted some 
younger body to scold and set to rights. We all 



THE WEDDING. 1 85 

miss a junior presence. It is wonderful how one 
young maiden freshens up, and keeps green, the 
paternal roof. Old and young seem to have an 
interest in her, so long as she is not absolutely dis- 
posed of. The youthfulness of the house is flown. 
Emily is married. 



THE CHILD ANGEL. 



A DREAM. 



I CHANCED upon the prettiest, oddest, fantastical 
thing of a dream the other night, that you shall hear 
of I had been reading the '' Loves of the Angels," 
and went to bed with my head full of speculations, 
suggested by that extraordinary legend. It had 
given birth to innumerable conjectures ; and, I re- 
member, the last waking thought, which I gave ex- 
pression to on my pillow, was a sort of wonder, 
"what could come of it." 

I was suddenly transported, how or whither I could 
scarcely make out — but to some celestial region. 
It was not the real heavens neither — not the down- 
right Bible heaven — but a kind of fairyland heaven, 
about which a poor human fancy may have leave to 
sport and air itself, I will hope, without presumption. 

Methought — what wild things dreams are ! — I 
was present — at what would you imagine ? — at an 
angel's gossiping. 

Whence it came, or how it came, or who bid it 
come, or whether it came purely of its own head, 



THE CHILD ANGEL. 1 87 

neither you nor I know — but there lay, sure enough, 
wrapt in its Httle cloudy swaddling bands — a Child 
Angel, 

Sun-threads — filmy beams — ran through the ce- 
lestial napery of what seemed its princely cradle. 
All the winged orders hovered round, watching when 
the new-born should open its yet closed eyes ; which, 
when it did, first one, and then the other — with a 
solicitude and apprehension, yet not such as, stained 
with fear, dims the expanding eye-lids of mortal 
infants, but as if to explore its path in those its un- 
hereditary palaces — what an inextinguishable titter 
that time spared not celestial visages ! Nor wanted 
there to my seemuig — O the inexplicable simpleness 
of dreams ! — bowls of that cheering nectar, 

— which mortals caudle call below — 

Nor were wanting faces of female ministrants, — 
stricken in years, as it might seem, — so dexterous 
were those heavenly attendants to counterfeit kindly 
similitudes of earth, to greet, with terrestrial child- 
rites the young present, which earth had made to 
heaven. 

Then were celestial harpings heard, not in full 
symphony as those by which the spheres are tu- 
tored ; but, as loudest instruments on earth speak 
oftentimes, muffled ; so to accommodate their sound 
the better to the weak ears of the imperfect-born. 



1 88 THE CHILD ANGEL. 

And, with the noise of those subdued soundings, the 
Angelet sprang forth, fluttering its rudiments of 
pinions — but forthwith flagged and was recovered 
into the arms of those full-winged angels. And a 
wonder it was to see how, as years went round in 
heaven — a year in dreams is as a day — continually 
its white shoulders put forth buds of wings, but, 
wanting the perfect angelic nutriment, anon was 
shorn of its aspiring, and fell fluttering — still caught 
by angel hands — for ever to put forth shoots, and 
to fall fluttering, because its birth was not of the 
unmixed vigour of heaven. 

And a name was given to the Babe Angel, and 
it was to be called Ge- Urania, because its produc- 
tion was of earth and heaven. 

And it could not taste of death, by reason of its 
adoption into immortal palaces : but it was to know 
weakness, and reliance, and the shadow of human 
imbecility ; and it went with a lame gait ; but in its 
goings it exceeded all mortal children in grace and 
swiftness. Then pity first sprang up in angelic 
bosoms ; and yearnings (like the human) touched 
them at the sight of the immortal lame one. 

And with pain did then first those Intuitive Es- 
sences, "with pain and strife to their natures (not 
grief), put back their bright intelligences, and re- 
duce their ethereal minds, schooling them to degrees 
and slower processes, so to adapt their lessons to 



THE CHILD ANGEL. " 189 

the gradual illumination (as must needs be) of the 
half-earth-born ; and what intuitive notices they 
could not repel (by reason that their nature is, to 
know all things at once), the half-heavenly novice, 
by the better part of its nature, aspired to receive 
into its understanding ; so that Humility and Aspi- 
ration went on even-paced in the instruction of the 
glorious Amphibium. 

But, by reason that Mature Humanity is too gross 
to breathe the air of that super-subtile region, its 
portion was, and is, to be a child for ever. 

And because the human part of it might not press 
into the heart and inwards of the palace of its adop- 
tion, those full-natured angels tended it by turns in 
the purlieus of the palace, where were shady groves 
and rivulets, like this green earth from which it 
came : so Love, with Voluntary Humility, waited 
upon the entertainment of the new-adopted. 

And myriads of years rolled round (in dreams 
Time is nothing), and still it kept, and is to keep, 
perpetual childhood, and is the Tutelar Genius of 
Childhood upon earth, and still goes lame and 
lovely. 

By the banks of " the river Pison is seen, lone- 
sitting by the grave of the terrestrial Adah, whom 
the angel Nadir loved, a Child ; but not the same 
which I saw in heaven. A mournful hue overcasts 
its lineaments; nevertheless, a correspondency is 



I go THE CHILD ANGEL. 

between the child by the grave, and that celestial 
orphan, whom I saw above ; and the dimness of the 
grief upon the heavenly, is as a shadow or emblem 
of that which stains the beauty of the terrestrial. 
And this correspondency is not to be understood 
but by dreams. 

And in the archives of heaven I had grace to read, 
how that once the angel Nadir, being exited from his 
place for mortal passion, upspringing on the wings 
of parental love (such power had parental love for 
a moment to suspend the else-irrevocable law) ap- 
peared for a brief instant in his station; and, de- 
positing a wondrous Birth, straightway disappeared, 
and the palaces knew him no more. xAnd this 
charge was the self-same Babe, who goeth lame and 
lovely — but Adah sleepeth by the river Pison. 



A DEATH-BED. 

IN A LETTER TO R. H. ESQ. OF B- 



I CALLED Upon you this morning, and found that 
you were gone to visit a dying friend. I had been 
upon a Hke errand. Poor N. R. has lain dying now 
for almost a week ; such is the penalty we pay for 
having enjoyed through life a strong constitution. 
Whether he knew me or not, I know not, or whether 
he saw me through his poor glazed eyes ; but the 
group I saw about him I shall not forget. Upon 
the bed, or about it, were assembled his Wife, their 
two Daughters, and poor deaf Robert, looking doubly 
stupified. There they were, and seemed to have 
been sitting all the week. I could only reach out a 
hand to Mrs. R. Speaking was impossible in that 
mute chamber. By this time it must be all over 
with him. In him I have a loss the world cannot 
make up. He was my friend, and my father's friend, 
for all the life that I can remember. I seem to 
have made foolish friendships since. Those are 
the friendships, which outlast a second generation. 



192 



THE DEATH-BED. 



Old as I am getting, in his eyes I was still the child 
he knew me. To the last he called me Jemmy. I 
have none to call me Jemmy now. He was the last 
link that bound me to B . You are but of yes- 
terday. In him I seem to have lost the old plain- 
ness of manners and singleness of heart. Lettered 
he was not ; his reading scarcely exceeded the 
Obituary of the old Gentleman's Magazine, to which 
he has never failed of having recourse for these last 
fifty years. Yet there was the pride of literature 
about him from that slender perusal ; and moreover 
from his office of archive-keeper to your ancient 
city, in which he must needs pick up some equivocal 
Latin ; which, among his less literary friends, as- 
sumed the air of a very pleasant pedantry. Can I 
forget the erudite look with which, having tried to 
puzzle out the text of a Black lettered Chaucer in 
your Corporation Library, to which he was a sort of 
Librarian, he gave it up with this consolatory re- 
flection — "Jemmy," said he ''I do not know what 
you find in these very old books, but I observe, 
there is a deal of very indifferent spelling in them." 
His jokes (for he had some) are ended ; but they 
were old Perennials, staple, and always as good as 
new. He had one Song, that spake of the " flat 
bottoms of our foes coming over in darkness," and 
alluded to a threatened Invasion, many years since 
blown over ; this he reserved to be sung on Christ- 



THE DEATH-BED. 193 

mas Night, which we always passed with him, and 
he sang it with the freshness of an impending event. 
How his eyes would sparkle when he came to the 
passage : — 

We'll still make 'em run, and we '11 still make *em sweat, 
In spite of the devil and Brussels' Gazette ! 

What is the Brussels' Gazette now? I cry, while I 
endite these trifles. His poor girls who are, I be- 
lieve, compact of solid goodness, will have to receive 
their afflicted mother at an unsuccessful home in a 

petty village in shire, where for years they have 

been struggling to raise a Girls' School with no ef- 
fect. Poor deaf Robert (and the less hopeful for 
being so) is thrown upon a deaf world, without the 
comfort to his father on his death-bed of knowing 
him provided for. They are left almost provision- 
less. Some life assurance there is ; but, I fear, not 

exceeding . Their hopes must be from your 

Corporation, which their father has served for fifty 
years. Who or what are your Leading Members 
now, I know not. Is there any, to whom without 
impertinence, you can represent the true circum- 
stances of the family ? You cannot say good enough 
of poor R., and his poor wife. Oblige me and the 
dead, if you can. 



13 



OLD CHINA. 



I HAVE an almost feminine partiality for old china. 
When I go to see any great house, I inquire for the 
china-closet, and next for the picture gallery. I 
cannot defend the order of preference, but by say- 
ing, that we have all some taste or other, of too 
ancient a date to admit of our remembering dis- 
tinctly that it was an acquired one. I can call to 
mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I 
was taken to ; but I am not conscious of a time 
when china jars and saucers were introduced into 
my imagination. 

I had no repugnance then — why should I now 
have? — to those little, lawless, azure-tinctured gro- 
tesques, that under the notion of men and women, 
float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that 
world before perspective — a china tea-cup. 

I like to see my old friends — whom distance 
cannot diminish — figuring up in the air (so they 
appear to our optics), yet on terra fii-ma still — for 



OLD CHINA, 195 

so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper 
blue, which the decorous artist, to prevent absur- 
dity, has made to spring up beneath their sandals. 

I love the men with women's faces, and the women, 
if possible, with still more womanish expressions. 

Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing 
tea to a lady from a salvar — two miles off. See how 
distance seems to set off respect ! And here the 
same lady, or another — for likeness is identity on 
tea-cups — is stepping into a httle fairy boat, moored 
on the hither side of this calm garden river, with a 
dainty mincing foot, which in a right angle of inci- 
dence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly 
land her ifi the midst of a flowery mead — a furlong 
off on the other side of the same strange stream ! 

Farther on — if far or near can be predicated of 
their world — see horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the 
hays. 

Here — a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-exten- 
sive — so objects show, seen through the lucid atmos- 
phere of fine Cathay. 

1 was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over 
our Hyson, (which we are old fashioned enough to 
drink unmixed still of an afternoon) some of these 
speciosa miracula upon a set of extraordinary old 
blue china (a recent purchase) which we were now 
for the first time using ; and could not help remark- 
ing, how favourable circumstances had been to us of 



196 OLD CHINA. 

late years, that we could afford to please the eye 
sometimes with trifles of this sort — when a passing 
sentiment seemed to over-shade the brows of my 
companion. I am quick at detecting these summer 
clouds in Bridget. 

*' I wish the good old times would come again," 
she said, *^when we were not quite so rich. I do 
not mean, that I want to be poor ; but there was a 
middle state; " — so she was pleased to ramble on, 
— " in which I am sure we were a great deal happier. 
A purchase is but a purchase, now that you have 
money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be 
a triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, 
O ! how much ado I had to get you to consent in 
those times !) we were used to have a debate two or 
three days before, and to weigh the for and against, 
and think what we might spare it out of, and what 
saving we could hit upon, that should be an equiva- 
lent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt 
the money that we paid for it. 

"Do you remember the brown suit, which you 
made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried 
shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare — and all 
because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which 
you dragged home late at night from Barker's in 
Covent-garden? Do you remember how we eyed it 
for weeks before we could make up our minds to the 
purchase, and had not come to a determination till 



OLD CHINA. 197 

it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night, when 
you set off from IsUngton, fearing you should be too 
late — and when the old bookseller with some grum- 
bling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for 
he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from 
his dusty treasures — and when you lugged it home, 
wishing it were twice as cumbersome — and when 
you presented it to me — and when we were explor- 
ing the perfectness of it {collating you called it) — 
and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves 
with paste, which your impatience would not suffer 
to be left till day-break — was there no pleasure in 
being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes 
which you wear now, and are so careful to keep 
brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give 
5^ou half the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it 
about in that over- worn suit — your old corbeau — ■ 
for four or five weeks longer than you should have 
done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum 
of fifteen — or sixteen shillings was it? — a great 
affair we thought it then — which you had lavished 
on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any 
book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever 
bring me home any nice old purchases now. 

" When you came home with twenty apologies for 
laying out a less number of shillings upon that print 
after Lionardo, which we christened the ' Lady 
Blanch ; ' when you looked at the purchase, and 



198 OLD CHINA. 

thought of the money — and thought of the money, 
and looked again at the picture^ — was there no 
pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have noth- 
ing to do but to walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a 
wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you? 

"Then, do you remember our pleasant walks to 
Enfield, and Potter's Bar, and Waltham, when we had 
a holyday — holydays, and all other fun, are gone, 
now we are rich — and the little hand-basket in which 
I used to deposit our day's fare of savory cold lamb 
and salad — ■ and how you would pry about at noon- 
tide for some decent house, where we might go in, 
and produce our store — only paying for the ale that 
you must call for — and speculate upon the looks of 
the landlady, and whether she was likely to allow 
us a table-cloth — and wish for such another honest 
hostess, as Izaak Walton has described many a one 
on the pleasant banks of the Lea, when he went a 
fishing — and sometimes they would prove obliging 
enough, and sometimes they would look grudgingly 
upon us — but we had cheerful looks still for one 
another, and would eat our plain food savorily, 
scarcely grudging Piscator his Trout Hall? Now, 
when we go out a day's pleasuring, which is seldom 
moreover, we ride part of the way — and go into a 
fine inn, and order the best of dinners, never debat- 
ing the expense — which, after all, never has half the 
relish of those chance country snaps, when we were 



OLD CHINA. 



199 



at the mercy of uncertain usage, and a precarious 
welcome. 

" You are too proud to see a play anywhere now 
but in the pit. Do you remember where it was we 
used to sit, when we saw the battle of Hexham, and 
the surrender of Calais, and Bannister and Mrs. Bland 
in the Children in the Wood — when we squeezed out 
our shilHngs a-piece to sit three or four times in a 
season in the one- shilling gallery — where you felt all 
the time that you ought not to have brought me — 
and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having 
brought me — and the pleasure was the better for a 
little shame — and when the curtain drew up, what 
cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered 
it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with 
Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of 
lllyria? You used to say, that the gallery was the 
best place of all for enjoying a play socially — that 
the relish of such exhibitions must be in propor- 
tion to the infrequency of going — that the company 
we met there, not being in general readers of plays, 
were obliged to attend the more, and did attend, to 
what was going on, on the stage — because a word 
lost would have been a chasm, which it was impos- 
sible for them to fill up. With such reflections we 
consoled our pride then — and I appeal to you, 
whether, as a woman, I met generally with less at- 
tention and accommodation, than I have done since 



200 OLD CHINA. 

in more expensive situations in the house? The 
getti^ig in indeed, and the crowding up those incon- 
venient staircases, was bad enough, — but there was 
still a law of civility to woman recognised to quite as 
great an extent as we ever found in the other pas- 
sages — and how a little difficulty overcome height- 
ened the 'snug seat, and the play, afterwards ! Now 
we can only pay our money, and walk in. You can- 
not see, you say, in the galleries now. I am sure we 
saw, and heard too, well enough then — but sight, 
and all, I think, is gone with our property. 

" There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before 
they became quite common — in the first dish of 
peas, while they were yet dear — to have them for 
a nice supper, a treat. What treat can we have now? 
If we were to treat ourselves now — that is, to have 
dainties a little above our means, it would be selfish 
and wicked. It is the very little more that we allow 
ourselves beyond what the actual poor can get at, that 
makes what I call a treat — when two people living 
together, as we have done, now and then indulge 
themselves in a cheap luxury, which both like ; while 
each apologises, and is willing to take both halves of 
the blame to his single share. I see no harm in 
people -making much of themselves in that sense of 
the word. It may give them a hint how to make 
much of others. But now — what I mean by the 
word — we never do make much of ourselves. None 



OLD CHINA. 201 

but the poor can do it. I do not mean the veriest 
poor of all, but persons as we were, just above 
poverty. 

" I know what you were going to say, that it is 
mighty pleasant at the end of the year to make all 
meet — and much ado we used to have every Thirty- 
first Night of December to account for our exceed- 
ings — many a long face did you make over your 
puzzled accounts, and in contriving to make it out 
how we had spent so much — or that we had not 
spent so much — or that it was impossible we should 
spend so much next year — and still we found our 
slender capital decreasing — but then, betwixt ways, 
and projects, and compromises of one sort or another, 
and talk of curtailing this charge, and doing without 
that for the future — and the hope that youth brings, 
and laughing spirits (in which you were never poor 
till now,) we pocketed up our loss, and in conclu- 
sion, with ' lusty brimmers ' (as you used to quote 
it out of hearty cheerful Mr. Cotton, as you called 
him), we used to welcome in the 'coming guest.' 
Now we have no reckoning at all at the end of the 
old year — no flattering promises about the new year 
doing better for us." 

Bridget is so sparing of her speech on most occa- 
sions, that when she gets into a rhetorical vein, I am 
careful how I interrupt it. I could not help, how- 
ever, smiling at the phantom of wealth which her 



202 OLD CHINA. 

dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear in- 
come of poor — hundred pounds a year. ''It is true 
we were happier when we were poorer, but we were 
also younger^ my cousin. I am afraid we must put 
up with the excess, for if we were to shake the super- 
flux into the sea, we should not much mend our- 
selves. That we had much to struggle with, as we 
grew up together, we have reason to be most thank- 
ful. It strengthened, and knit our compact closer. 
We could never have been what we have been to 
each other, if we had always had the sufficiency which 
you now complain of. The resisting power — those 
natural dilations of the youthful spirit, which cir- 
cumstances cannot straiten — with us are long since 
passed away. Competence to age is supplementary 
youth ; a sorry supplement indeed, but I fear the 
best that is to be had. We must ride, where we 
formerly walked : live better, and lie softer — and 
shall be wise to do so — than we had means to do 
in those good old days you speak of. Yet could 
those days return — could you and I once more 
walk our thirty miles a-day — could Bannister and 
Mrs. Bland again be young, and you and I be young 
to see them — could the good old one shilling gallery 
days return — they are dreams, my cousin, now — 
but could you and I at this moment, instead of this 
quiet argument, by our well-carpeted fire-side, sit- 
ting on this luxurious sofa — be once more struggling 



OLD CHINA. 203 

up those inconvenient stair-cases, pushed about, and 
squeezed, and elbowed by the poorest rabble of poor 
gallery scramblers — could I once more hear those 
anxious shrieks of yours — and the delicious Thank 
God, we are safe, which always followed when the 
topmost stair, conquered, let in the first light of the 
whole cheerful theatre down beneath us — I know 
not the fathom line that ever touched a descent so 
deep as I would be willing to bury more wealth in 

than Croesus had, or the great Jew R is supposed 

to have, to purchase it. And now do just look at that 
merry little Chinese waiter holding an umbrella, big 
enough for a bed-tester, over the head of that pretty 
insipid half-Madona-ish chit of a lady in that very 
blue summer house." 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 



L 

THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD. 

This axiom contains a principle of compensation, 
which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there 
is no safe trusting to dictionaries and definitions. 
We should more willingly fall in with this popular 
language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awk- 
wardly coupled with valour in the same vocabulary. 
The comic writers, with their poetical justice, have 
contributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. 
To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon 
the stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. 
Some people's share of animal spirits is notoriously 
low and defective. It has not strength to raise a 
vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. 
These love to be told that huffing is no part of valour. 
The truest courage with them is that which is the 
least noisy and obtrusive. But confront one of these 
silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his 
confidence in the theory quickly vanishes. Preten- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 205 

sions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A 
modest inoffensive deportment does not necessarily 
imply valour; neither does the absence of it justify 
us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted modesty 
— we do not mean him of Clarissa — but who ever 
doubted his courage ? Even the poets — upon whom 
this equitable distribution of qualities should be most 
binding — have thought it agreeable to nature to 
depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in 
the " Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received 
notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, 
a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, 
talks of driving armies singly before him — and does 
it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind 
of character than either of his predecessors. He 
divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero 
a sort of dimidiate pre-eminence : — "Bully Dawson 
kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked 
by Bully Dawson." This was true distributive justice. 

II. 

THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS. 

The weakest part of mankind have this saying com- 
monest in their mouth. It is the trite consolation 
administered to the easy dupe, when he has been 
tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisi- 



206 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

tion of it will do the owner no good. But the rogues 
of this world — the prudenter part of them, at least 
■ — know better ; and, if the observation had been as 
true as it is old, would not have failed by this time to 
have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinc- 
tions of the fluctuating and the permanent. " Lightly 
come, lightly go," is a proverb, which they can very 
well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the 
losers. They do not always find manors, got by rapine 
or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets 
will have it ; or that all gold glides, like thawing 
snow, from the thief's hand that grasps it. Church 
land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly denounced 
to have this slippery quality. But some portions of 
it somehow always stuck so fast, that the denunciators 
have been fain to postpone the prophecy of refund- 
ment to a late posterity. 

III. 

THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST. 

The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the 
self-denial of poor human nature ! This is to ex- 
pect a -gentleman to give a treat without partaking 
of it ; to sit esurient at his own table, and commend 
the flavour of his venison upon the absurd strength of 
his never touching it himself. On the contrary, we 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 20'J 

love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party ; to 
watch a quirk, or a merry conceit, flickering upon the 
lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered of 
it. If it be good, fresh, and racy — begotten of the 
occasion ; if he that utters it never thought it before, 
he is naturally the first to be tickled with it ; and any 
suppression of such complacence we hold to be chur- 
lish and insulting. What does it seem to imply, but 
that your company is weak or foolish enough to be 
moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not 
at all, or but faintly? This is exactly the humour of 
the fine gentleman in Mandeville, who, while he 
dazzles his guests with the display of some costly 
toy, affects himself to '' see nothing considerable in 
it." 



IV. 



THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING. — THAT IT 
IS EASY TO PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN. 

A SPEECH from the poorer sort of people, which al- 
ways indicates that the party vituperated is a gentle- 
man. The very fact which they deny, is that which 
galls and exasperates them to use this language. The 
forbearance with which it is usually received, is a 
proof what interpretation the bystander sets upon it. 
Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are the phrases 



208 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

with which, in their street rhetoric, they ply one 
another more grossly : — He is a poor creature, — 

He has not a i-ag to cover -oi^c. ; though this last, 

we confess, is more frequently applied by females to 
females. They do not perceive that the satire glances 
upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in the 
world, should not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. 
Are there no other topics — as, to tell him his father 

was hanged — his sister, &c. — , without exposing 

a secret, which should be kept snug between them ; 
and doing an affront to the order to which they have 
the honour equally to belong? All this while they do 
not see how the wealthier man stands by and laughs 
in his sleeve at both. 



V. 



THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. 

A SMOOTH text to the latter ; and, preached from the 
pulpit, is sure of a docile audience from the pews 
lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a 
foolish squire to be told, that he — and not perverse 
nature, as the homihes would make us imagine, is the 
true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This 
is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying 
the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not 
such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the absti- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 



209 



nence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to 
derive itself from no higher principle, than the appre- 
hension of setting ill patterns to the lower, we beg 
leave to discharge them from all squeamishness on 
that score : they may even take their fill of pleasures, 
where they can find them. The Genius of Poverty, 
hampered and straitened as it is, is not so barren of 
invention but it can trade upon the staple of its own 
vice, without drawing upon their capital. The poor 
are not quite such servile imitators as they take them 
for. Some of them are very clever artists in their 
way. Here and there we find an original. Who 
taught the poor to steal, to pilfer? They did not go 
to the great for schoolmasters in these faculties surely. 
It is well if in some vices they allow us to be — no 
copyists. In no other sense is it true that the poor 
copy them, than as servants may be said to take after 
their masters and mistresses, when they succeed to 
their reversionary cold meats. If the master, from 
indisposition or some other cause, neglect his food, 
the servant dines notwithstanding. 

" O, but (some will say) the force of example is 
great." We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on 
this head, that she would put up with the calls of the 
most impertinent visitor, rather than let her servant 
say she was not at home, for fear of teaching her 
maid to tell an untruth ; and this in the very face of 
the fact, which she knew well enough, that the wench 



210 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

was one of the greatest liars upon the earth without 
teaching; so much so, that her mistress possibly 
never heard two words of consecutive truth from her 
in her life. But nature must go for nothing : example 
must be everything. This liar in grain, who never 
opened her mouth without a lie, must be guarded 
against a remote inference, which she (pretty casuist !) 
might possibly draw from a form of words — literally 
false, but essentially deceiving no one — that under 
some circumstances a fib might not be so exceedingly 
sinful — a fiction, too, not at all in her own way, or 
one that she could be suspected of adopting, for few 
servant-wenches care to be denied to visitors. 

This word example reminds us of another fine word 
which is in use upon these occasions — encottragement 
" People in our sphere must not be thought to give 
encouragement to such proceedings." To such a 
frantic height is this principle capable of being car- 
ried, that we have known individuals who have 
thought it within the scope of their influence to sanc- 
tion despair, and give eclat to — suicide. A domes- 
tic in the family of a county member lately deceased, 
for love, or some unknown cause, cut his throat, but 
not successfully. The poor fellow was otherwise much 
loved and respected ; and great interest was used in 
his behalf, upon his recovery, that he might be per- 
mitted to retain his place ; his word being first 
pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 211 

promise for him, that the like should never happen 
again. His master was inclinable to keep him, but 
his mistress thought otherwise ; and John in the end 
was dismissed, her ladyship declaring that she " could 
not think of encouraging any such doings in the 
county," 

VI. 

THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. 

Not a man, woman, or child in ten miles round 
Guildhall, who really believes this saying. The in- 
ventor of it did not beUeve it himself. It was made 
in revenge by somebody, who was disappointed of a 
regale. It is a vile cold- scrag-of- mutton sophism ; a 
lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better 
things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this 
is sufficient, that from the superfiux there is usually 
something left for the next day. Morally interpreted, 
it belongs to a class of proverbs, which have a ten- 
dency to make us undervalue money. Of this cast 
are those notable observations, that money is not 
health ; riches cannot purchase everything : the met- 
aphor which makes gold to be mere muck, with the 
morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep's 
back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome excre- 
tion of an oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which 



212 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

imiDutes dirt to acres — a sophistry so barefaced, that 
even the literal sense of it is true only in a wet season. 
This, and abundance of similar sage saws assuming 
to inculcate content, we verily believe to have been 
the invention of some cunning borrower, who had 
designs upon the purse of his wealthier neighbour, 
which he could only hope to carry by force of these 
verbal jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings 
out of the artful metonyme which envelopes it, and 
the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of 
mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the 
opportunities of seeing foreign countries, indepen- 
dence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are 
not mtick — however we may be pleased to scandalise 
with that appellation the faithful metal that provides 
them for us. 



VII. 

OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN 
THE WRONG. 

Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite 
conclusion. Temper, indeed, is no test of truth ; but 
warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of a 
man's own conviction of the rectitude of that which 
he maintains. Coolness is as often the result of an 
unprincipled indifference to truth or falsehood, as of 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 21 3 

a sober confidence in a man's own side in a dispute. 
Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the appear- 
ance of this philosophic temper. There is little Titu- 
bus, the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's Inn — 
we have seldom known this shrewd Httle fellow en- 
gaged in an argument where we were not convinced 
he had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly 
have seconded him. When he has been spluttering 
excellent broken sense for an hour together, writhing 
and labouring to be delivered of the point of dispute 
- — the very gist of the controversy knocking at his 
teeth, which like some obstinate iron-grating still 
obstructed its deliverance — his puny frame con- 
vulsed, and face reddening all over at an unfairness 
in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, 
it has moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow 
of an adversary, that cared not a button for the merits 
of the question, by merely laying his hand upon the 
head of the stationer, and desiring him to be calm 
(your tall disputants have always the advantage), with 
a provoking sneer carry the argument clean from him 
in the opinion of all the by-standers, who have gone 
away clearly convinced that Titubus must have been 
in the wrong, because he was in a passion \ and that 

Mr. , meaning his opponent, is one of the fairest, 

and at the same time one of the most dispassionate 
arguers breathing. 



214 POPULAR FALLACIES. 



VIII. 

THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY 
WILL NOT BEAR A TRANSLATION. 

The same might be said of the wittiest local allu- 
sions. A custom is sometimes as difficult to explain 
to a foreigner as a pun. What would become of a 
great part of the wit of the last age, if it were tried 
by this test? How would certain topics, as alder- 
manity, cuckoldry, have sounded to a Terentian 
auditory, though Terence himself had been alive to 
translate them? Senator urbanus, with Curruca to 
boot for a synonym, would but faintly have done the 
business. Words, involving notions, are hard enough 
to render ; it is too much to expect us to translate a 
sound, and give an elegant version to a jingle. The 
Virgilian harmony is not translatable, but by substi- 
tuting harmonious sounds in another language for it. 
To Latinise a pun, we must seek a pun in Latin, that 
will answer to it; as, to give an idea of the double 
endings in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a 
similar practice in the old monkish doggrel. Dennis, 
the fiercest oppugner of puns in ancient or modern 
times, professes himself highly tickled with the '^ a 
stick" chiming to "ecclesiastic." Yet what is this 
but a species of pun, a verbal consonance ? 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 21$ 



IX. 



THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST. 

If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched 
and starthng, we agree to it. A pun is not bound 
by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a pistol let 
off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. 
It is an antic which does not stand upon manners, 
but comes bounding into the presence, and does 
not show the less comic for being dragged in some- 
times by the head and shoulders. What though it 
limp a little, or prove defective in one leg — all the 
better. A pun may easily be too curious and arti- 
ficial. Who has not at one time or other been at a 
party of professors (himself perhaps an old offender 
in that line), where, after ringing a round of the 
most ingenious conceits, every man contributing his 
shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the 
day ; after making a poor word run the gauntlet till 
it is ready to drop ; after hunting and winding it 
through all the possible ambages of similar sounds ; 
after squeezing, and hauling, and tugging at it, till the 
very milk of it will not yield a drop further, — suddenly 
some obscure, unthought of fellow in a corner, who 
was never 'prentice to the trade, whom the company 
for very pity passed over^ as we do by a known poor 



2l6 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

man when a money-subscription is going round, no 
one calling upon him for his quota — has all at once 
come out with something so whimsical, yet so perti- 
nent ; so brazen in its pretensions, yet so impossible 
to be denied ; so exquisitely good, and so deplorably 
bad, at the same time, — that it has proved a Robin 
Hood's shot ; anything ulterior to that is despaired 
of; and the party breaks up, unanimously voting it 
to be the very worst (that is, best) pun of the even- 
ing. This species of wit is the better for not being 
perfect in all its parts. What it gains in complete- 
ness, it loses in naturalness. The more exactly it 
satisfies the critical, the less hold it has upon some 
other faculties. The puns which are most entertain- 
ing are those which will least bear an analysis. Of 
this kind is the following, recorded, with a sort of 
stigma, in one of Swift's Miscellanies. 

An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carry- 
ing a hare through the streets, accosts him with this 
extraordinary question : " Prithee, friend, is that thy 
own hare, or a wig? " 

There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A 
man might blur ten sides of paper in attempting a 
defence of it against a critic who should be laughter- 
proof." The quibble in itself is not considerable. It 
is only a new turn given, by a little false pronuncia- 
tion, to a very common, though not very courteous 
inquiry. Put by one gentleman to another at a 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 21/ 

dinner-party, it would have been vapid ; to the mis- 
tress of the house, it would have shown much less wit 
than rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, 
place, and person ; the pert look of the inquiring 
scholar, the desponding looks of the puzzled porter; 
the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on 
with his burthen ; the innocent though rather abrupt 
tendency of the first member of the question, with the 
utter and inextricable irrelevancy of the second ; the 
place — a public street, not favourable to frivolous 
investigations ; the affrontive quality of the primitive 
inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred 
to the derivative (the new turn given to it) in the 
implied satire ; namely, that few of that tribe are 
expected to eat of the good things which they carry, 
they being in most countries considered rather as the 
temporary trustees than owners of such dainties, — 
which the fellow was beginning to understand ; but 
then the wig again comes in, and he can make noth- 
ing of it : all put together constitute a picture : 
Hogarth could have made it intelligible on canvass. 
Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this 
a very bad pun, because of the defectiveness in the 
concluding member, which is its very beauty, and 
constitutes the surprise. The same persons shall cry 
up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about 
the broken Cremona* ; because it is made out in all 

* Swift. 



2l8 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

its parts, and leaves nothing to the imagination. We 
venture to call it cold ; because of thousands who 
have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who 
has heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the 
judgment merely (setting the risible faculty aside,) 
we must pronounce it a monument of curious felicity. 
But as some stories are said to be too good to be 
true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this bi- 
verbal allusion, that it is too good to be natural. One 
cannot help suspecting that the incident was invented 
to fit the line. It would have been better had it been 
less perfect. Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has 
suffered by filling up. The nimium Vicina was enough 
in conscience ; the Cremonce afterwards loads it. It 
is in fact a double pun ; and we have always observed 
that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is dangerous. 
When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic 
to follow it up. We do not care to be cheated a 
second time ; or, perhaps, the mind of man (with 
reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough to 
lodge two puns at a time. The impression, to be 
forcible, must be simultaneous and undivided. 

X. 

THAT HANDSOME IS THAT HANDSOME DOES. 

THOst who use this proverb can never have seen 
Mrs. Conrady. 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 219 

The soul, if we may believe Plotinus, is a ray from 
the celestial beauty. As she partakes more or less of 
this heavenly light, she informs, with corresponding 
characters, the fleshly tenement which she chooses, 
and frames to herself a suitable mansion. 

All which only proves that the soul of Mrs. 
Conrady, in her pre-existent state, was no great 
judge of architecture. 

To the same effect, in a Hymn in honour of Beauty, 
divine Spenser, platonizing, sings : — 

" Every spirit as it is more pure, 



And liath in it the more of heavenly light, 
So it the fairer body doth procure 
To habit in, and it more fairly dight 
With cheerful grace and amiable sight. 
For of the soul the body form doth take : 
For soul is form, and doth the body make.'* 

But Spenser, it is clear, never saw Mrs. Conrady. 

These poets, we find, are no safe guides in philos- 
ophy ; for here, in his very next stanza but one, is a 
saving clause, which throws us all out again, and 
leaves us as much to seek as ever : — 

" Yet oft it falls, that many a gentle mind 
Dwells in deformed tabernacle drown'd, 
Either by chance, against the course of kind, 
Or through unaptness in the substance found, 
Which it assumed of some stubborn ground, 
That will not yield unto her form's direction. 
But is perform'd with some foul imperfection." 



220 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

From which it would follow, that Spenser had seen 
somebody like Mrs. Conrady. 

The spirit of this good lady — her previous aninia 
— must have stumbled upon one of these untoward 
tabernacles which he speaks of. A more rebelHous 
commodity of clay for a ground, as the poet calls 
it, no gentle mind — and sure her's is one of the 
gentlest — ever had to deal with. 

Pondering upon her inexplicable visage — inex- 
plicable, we mean, but by this modification of the 
theory — we have come to a conclusion that, if one 
must be plain, it is better to be plain all over, than, 
amidst a tolerable residue of features, to hang out 
one that shall be exceptionable. No one can say of 
Mrs. Conrady's countenance, that it would be better 
if she had but a nose. It is impossible to pull her 
to pieces in this manner. We have seen the most 
malicious beauties of her own sex baffled in the at- 
tempt at a selection. The tout ensemble defies par- 
ticularising. It is too complete — too consistent, as 
we may say — to admit of these invidious reserva- 
tions. It is not as if some Apelles had picked out 
here a lip — and there a chin — out of the collected 
ugliness of Greece, to frame a model by. It is a 
symmetrical whole. We challenge the minutest con- 
noisseur to cavil at any part or parcel of the coun- 
tenance in question ; to say that this, or that, is 
improperly placed. We are convinced that true ugli- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 221 

ness, no less than is affirmed of true beauty, is the 
result of harmony. Like that too it reigns without a 
competitor. No one ever saw Mrs. Conrady, without 
pronouncing her to be the plainest woman that he 
ever met with in the course of his life. The first 
time that you are indulged with a sight of her face, 
is an era in your existence ever after. You are glad 
to have seen it — like Stonehenge. No one can pre- 
tend to forget it. No one ever apologised to her for 
meeting her in the street on such a day and not 
knowing her : the pretext would be too bare. No- 
body can mistake her for another. Nobody can say 
of her, " I think I have seen that face somewhere, 
but I cannot call to mind where." You must remem- 
ber that in such a parlour it first struck you — like a 
bust. You wondered where the owner of the house 
had picked it up. You wondered more when it 
began to move its lips — so mildly too ! No one 
ever thought of asking her to sit for her picture. 
Lockets are for remembrance ; and it would be clearly 
superfluous to hang an image at your heart, which, 
once seen, can never be out of it. It is not a mean 
face either; its entire originality precludes that. 
Neither is it of that order of plain faces which im- 
prove upon acquaintance. Some very good but ordi- 
nary people, by an unwearied perseverance in good 
offices, put a cheat upon our eyes : juggle our senses 
out of their natural impressions ; and set us upon dis- 
covering good indications in a countenance, which at 



222 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

first sight promised nothing less. We detect gentle- 
ness, which had escaped us, lurking about an under 
lip. But when Mrs. Conrady has done you a service, 
her face remains the same ; when she has done you a 
thousand, and you know that she is ready to double 
the number, still it is that individual face. Neither 
can you say of it, that it would be a good face if it 
was not marked by the small pox — a compliment 
which is always more admissive than excusatory — for 
either Mrs. Conrady never had the small pox ; or, as 
we say, took it kindly. No, it stands upon its own 
merits fairly. There it is. It is her mark, her 
token ; that which she is known by. 

XL 

THAT WE MUST NOT LOOK A GIFT- HORSE IN THE 
MOUTH, 

Nor a lady's age in the parish register. We hope 
we have more dehcacy than to do either : but some 
faces spare us the trouble of these dental inquiries. 
And what if the beast, which my friend would force 
upon my acceptance, prove, upon the face of it, a 
sorry Rozinante, a lean, ill-favoured jade, whom no 
gentleman could think of setting up in his stables? 
Must I, rather than not be obliged to my friend, make 
her a companion to Eclipse or Lightfoot? A horse- 
giver, no more than a horse-seller, has a right to palm 
his spavined article upon us for good ware. An equiv- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 223 

alent is expected in either case ; and, with my own 
good will, I would no more be cheated out of my 
thanks, than out of my money. Some people have a 
knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to 
engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them 
for nothing. Our friend Mitis carries this humour 
of never refusing a present, to the very point of 
absurdity — if it were possible to couple the ridicu- 
lous with so much mistaken delicacy, and real good- 
nature. Not an apartment in his fine house (and 
he has a true taste in household decorations), but 
is stuffed up with some preposterous print or mir- 
ror — the worst adapted to his pannels that may 
be — the presents of his friends that know his 
weakness ; while his noble Vandykes are displaced, 
to make room for a set of daubs, the work of some 
wretched artist of his acquaintance, who, having had 
them returned upon his hands for bad likenesses, 
finds his account in bestowing them here gratis. The 
good creature has not the heart to mortify the painter 
at the expense of an honest refusal. It is pleasant 
(if it did not vex one at the same time) to see him 
sitting in his dining parlour, surrounded with obscure 
aunts and cousins to God knows whom, while the true 
Lady Marys and Lady Bettys of his own honourable 
family, in favour to these adopted frights, are con- 
signed to the staircase and the lumber-room. In like 
manner his goodly shelves are one by one stript of his 
favourite old authors, to give place to a collection of 



224 * POPULAR FALLACIES. 

presentation copies — the flower and bran of modern 
poetry. A presentation copy, reader — if haply you 
are yet innocent of such favours — is a copy of a 
book which does not sell, sent you by the author, 
with his foolish autograph at the beginning of it ; for 
which, if a stranger, he only demands your friendship ; 
if a brother author, he expects from you a book of 
yours which does sell, in return. We can speak to 
experience, having by us a tolerable assortment of 
these gift-horses. Not to ride a metaphor to death 
— we are willing to acknowledge, that in some gifts 
there is sense. A duplicate out of a friend's library 
(where he has more than one copy of a rare author) 
is intelligible. There are favours, short of the pecu- 
niary — a thing not fit to be hinted at among gen- 
tlemen - — which confer as much grace upon the 
acceptor as the offerer : the kind, we confess, which 
is most to our palate, is of those little conciliatory 
missives, which for their vehicle generally choose a 
hamper • — little odd presents of game, fruit, perhaps 
wine — though it is essential to the delicacy of the 
latter that it be home-made. We love to have our 
friend in the country sitting thus at our table by 
proxy ; to apprehend his presence (though a hundred 
miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly 
aspect reflects to us his " plump corpusculum ; " to 
taste him in grouse or woodcock ; to feel him gliding 
down in the toast peculiar to the latter ; to concor- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 225 

porate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is 
indeed to have him within ourselves ; to know him 
intimately : such participation is methinks unitive, as 
the old theologians phrase it. For these considera- 
tions we should be sorry if certain restrictive regu- 
lations, which are thought to bear hard upon the 
peasantry of this country, were entirely done away 
with. A hare, as the law now stands, makes many 
friends. Caius conciliates Titius (knowing his gouf) 
with a leash of partridges. Titius (suspecting his 
partiality for them) passes them to Lucius; who in 
his turn, preferring his friend's relish to his own, 
makes them over to Marcius ; till in their ever-widen- 
ing progress, and round of unconscious circum-migra- 
tion, they distribute the seeds of harmony over half 
a parish. We are well disposed to this kind of sen- 
sible remembrances ; and are the less apt to be taken 
by those little* airy tokens — impalpable to the palate 
— which, under the names of rings, lockets, keep- 
sakes, amuse some people's fancy mightily. We 
could never away with these indigestible trifles. They 
are the very kickshaws and foppery of friendship. 

XII. 

THAT HOME IS HOME THOUGH IT IS NEVER SO 
HOMELY. 

Homes there are, we are sure, that are no homes : the 
home of the very poor man, and another which we 

15 



226 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

shall speak to presently. Crowded places of cheap 
entertainment, and the benches of alehouses, if they 
could speak, might bear mournful testimony to the 
first. To them the very poor man resorts for an 
image of the home, which he cannot find at home. 
For a starved grate, and a scanty firing, that is not 
enough to keep alive the natural heat in the fingers 
of so many shivering children with their mother, he 
finds in the depth of winter always a blazing hearth, 
and a hob to warm his pittance of beer by. Instead 
of the clamours of a wife, made gaunt by famish- 
ing, he meets with a cheerful attendance beyond the 
merits of the trifle which he can afford to spend. He 
has companions which his home denies him, for the 
very poor man has no visiters. He can look into the 
goings on of the world, and speak a little to politics. 
At home there are no politics stirring, but the domes- 
tic. All interests, real or imaginary, all topics that 
should expand the mind of man, and connect him to 
a sympathy with general existence, are crushed in the 
absorbing consideration of food to be obtained for the 
family. Beyond the price of bread, news is sense- 
less and impertinent. At home there is no larder. 
Here there is at least a show of plenty ; and while he 
cooks- his lean scrap of butcher's meat before the com- 
mon bars, or munches his humbler cold viands, his 
relishing bread and cheese with an onion, in a corner, 
where no one reflects upon his poverty, he has sight 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 22/ 

of the substantial joint providing for the landlord and 
his family. He takes an interest in the dressing of 
it ; and while he assists in removing the trivet from 
the fire, he feels that there is such a thing as beef 
and cabbage, which he was beginning to forget at 
home. All this while he deserts his wife and chil- 
dren. But what wife, and what children? Prosper- 
ous men, who object to this desertion, image to 
themselves some clean contented family like that 
which they go home to. But look at the counte- 
nance of the poor wives who follow and persecute 
their good man to the door of the public house, which 
he is about to enter, when something like shame would 
restrain him, if stronger misery did not induce him 
to pass the threshold. That face, ground by want, 
in which every- cheerful, every conversable lineament 
has been long effaced by misery, — is that a face to 
stay at home with? is it more a woman, or a wild 
cat ? alas ! it is the face of the wife of his youth, that 
once smiled upon him. It can smile no longer. 
What comforts can it share? what burthens can it 
lighten? Oh, 'tis a fine thing to talk of the humble 
meal shared together ! But what if there be no bread 
in the cupboard? The innocent prattle of his chil- 
dren takes out the sting of a man's poverty. But the 
children of the very poor do not prattle. It is none 
of the least frightful features in that condition, that 
there is no childishness in its dwellings. Poor people, 



223 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

said a sensible old nurse to us once, do not bring up 
their children ; they drag them up. The little care- 
less darling of the wealthier nursery, in their hovel is 
transformed betimes into a premature reflecting per- 
son. No one has time to dandle it, no one thinks it 
worth while to coax it, to soothe it, to toss it up and 
down, to humour it. There is none to kiss away its 
tears. If it cries, it can only be beaten. It has been 
prettily said that '' a babe is fed with milk and praise." 
But the aliment of this poor babe was thin, unnourish- 
ing : the return to its little baby-tricks, and efforts 
to engage attention, bitter ceaseless objurgation. It 
never had a toy, or knew what a coral meant. It 
grew up without the lullaby of nurses, it was a stranger 
to the patient fondle, the hushing caress, the attract- 
ing novelty, the costlier plaything, or the cheaper off- 
hand contrivance to divert the child ; the prattled 
nonsense (best sense to it), the wise impertinences, 
the wholesome lies, the apt story interposed, that puts 
a stop to present sufferings, and awakens the passion 
of young wonder. It was never sung to — no one 
ever told to it a tale of the nursery. It was dragged 
up, to live or to die as it hajypened. It had no young 
dreams. It broke at once into the iron realities of 
life. A child exists not for the very poor as any ob- 
ject of dalliance ; it is only another mouth to be fed, 
a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to labour. 
It is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for food 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 229 

with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, 
his solace ; it never makes him young again, with 
recalUng his young times. The children of the very 
poor have no young times. It makes the very heart 
to bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a 
poor woman and her little girl, a woman of tne better 
sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid 
beings which we have been contemplating. It is not 
of toys, of nursery books, of summer holidays (fitting 
that age) ; of the promised sight, or play; of praised 
sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear- 
starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The 
questions of the child, that should be the very out- 
pourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with 
forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to 
be a woman, before it was a child. It has learned 
to go to market ; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it 
murmurs ; it is knowing, acute, sharpened ; it never 
prattles. Had we not reason to say, that the home 
of the very poor is no home ? 

There is yet another home, which we are con- 
strained to deny to be one. It has a larder, which 
the home of the poor man wants ; its fireside con- 
veniences, of which the poor dream not. But with 
all this, it is no home. It is — the house of the man 
that is infested with many visiters. May we be 
branded for the veriest churl, if we deny our heart 
to the many noble-hearted friends that at times ex- 



230 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

change their dwelling for our poor roof ! It is not of 
guests that we complain, but of endless, purposeless 
visitants ; droppers in, as they are called. We some- 
times wonder from what sky they fall. It is the very 
error of the position of our lodging; its horoscopy 
was ill calculated, being just situate in a medium — 
a plaguy suburban mid- space — fitted to catch idlers 
from town or country. We are older than we were, 
and age is easily put out of its way. We have fewer 
sands in our glass to reckon upon, and we cannot 
brook to see them drop in endlessly succeeding im- 
pertinences. At our time of life, to be alone some- 
times is as needful as sleep. It is the refreshing sleep 
of the day. The growing infirmities of age manifest 
themselves in nothing more strongly, than in an in- 
veterate dislike of interruption. The thing which we 
are doing, we wish to be permitted to do. We have 
neither much knowledge nor devices ; but there are 
fewer in the place to which we hasten. We are not 
willingly put out of our way, even at a game of nine- 
pins. While youth was, we had vast reversions in 
time future ; we are reduced to a present pittance, 
and obliged to economise in that article. We bleed 
away our moments now as hardly as our ducats. We 
cannot bear to have our thin wardrobe- eaten and 
fretted into by moths. We are willing to barter our 
good time with a friend, who gives us in exchange 
his own. Herein is the distinction between the gen- 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 23 I 

uine guest and the visitant. This latter takes your 
good time, and gives you his bad in exchange The 
guest is domestic to you as your good cat, or house- 
hold bird; the visitant is your fly, that flaps in at 
your window, and out again, leaving nothing but a 
sense of disturbance, and victuals spoiled. The infe- 
rior functions of life begin to move heavily. We 
cannot concoct our food with interruptions. Our 
chief meal, to be nutritive, must be solitary. With 
difliculty we can eat before a guest ; and never under- 
stood what the relish of public feasting meant. Meats 
have no sapor, nor digestion fair play, in a crowd. 
The unexpected coming in of a visitant stops the 
machine. There is a punctual generation who time 
their calls to the precise commencement of your 
dining-hour — not to eat — but to see you eat. Our 
knife and fork drop instinctively, and we feel that we 
have swallowed our latest morsel. Others again show 
their genius, as we have said, in knocking the moment 
you have just sat down to a book. They have a 
peculiar compassionating sneer, with which they 
'■ hope that they do not interrupt your studies." 
Though they flutter off the next moment, to carry 
their impertinences to the nearest student that they 
can call their friend, the tone of the book is spoiled ; 
we shut the leaves, and, with Dante's lovers, read no 
more that day. It were well if the effect of intrusion 
were simply co-extensive with its presence; but it 



232 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

mars all the good hours afterwards. These scratches 
in appearance leave an orifice that closes not hastily. 
" It is a prostitution of the bravery of friendship," 
says worthy Bishop Taylor, " to spend it upon imper- 
tinent people, who are, it may be, loads to their fami- 
lies, but can never ease my loads." This is the secret 
of their gaddings, their visits, and morning calls. They 
too have homes, which are — no homes. 

XIIL 

THAT YOU MUST LOVE ME, AND LOVE MY DOG. 

" Good sir, or madam, as it may be — we most wil- 
lingly embrace the offer of your friendship. We long 
have known your excellent qualities. We have wished 
to have you nearer to us ; to hold you within the very 
innermost fold of our heart. We can have no reserve 
towards a person of your open and noble nature. The 
frankness of your humour suits us exactly. We have 
been long looking for such a friend. Quick — let us 
disburthen our troubles into each other's bosom — let 
us make our single joy shine by reduplication — But 
yap^ yap^ yap ! — what is this confounded cur? he 
has fastened his tooth, which is none of the bluntest, 
just in the fleshy part of my leg." 

" It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my 
sake. Here, Test — Test — Test ! " 

*' But he has bitten me." 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 



233 



" Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better ac- 
quainted with him. I have had him three years. He 
never bites me." 

Yap, yap, yap ! — " He is at it again." 

" Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not 
like to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated 
with all the respect due to myself." 

" But do you always take him out with you, when 
you go a friendship-hunting?" 

" Invariably. 'T is the sweetest, prettiest, best- 
conditioned animal I call him my test — the touch- 
stone by which I try a friend. No one can properly 
be said to love me, who does not love him." 

" Excuse us, dear sir — or madam aforesaid — if 
upon further consideration we are obliged to decline 
the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. 
We do not like dogs." 

" Mighty well, sir — you know the conditions — 
you may have worse offers. Come along, Test." 

The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, 
in the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occa- 
sions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason 
of these canine appendages. They do not always 
come in the shape of dogs ; they sometimes wear the 
more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near 
acquaintances, my friend's friend, his partner, his 
wife, or his children. We could never yet form a 
friendship — not to speak of more delicate corre- 



234 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

spondences — however much to our taste, without the 
intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent 
clog affixed to the relation — the understood dog in 
the proverb. \ The good things of life are not to be 
had singly, but come to us with a mixture ; like a 
schoolboy's holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of 
it. What a delightful companion is ****, if he did 
not always bring his tall cousin with him ! He seems 
to grow with him ; like some of those double births, 
which we remember to have read of with such 
wonder and delight in the old '' Athenian Oracle," 
where Swift commenced author by writing Pindaric 
Odes (what a beginning for him !) upon Sir William 
Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with 
the little brother peeping out at his shoulder ; a 
species of fraternity, which we have no name of kin 
close enough to comprehend. When **** comes, 
poking in his head and shoulders into your room, as 
if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now 
got him to yourself — what a three hours' chat we 
shall have ! — but, ever in the haunch of him, and 
before his diffident body is well disclosed in your 
apartment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, 
over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to overlay 
the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity 
of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness of obser- 
vation. I Misfortunes seldom come alone. 'T is hard 
when a blessing comes accompanied. Cannot we 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 235 

like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with 
her eternal brother? or know Sulpicia, without know- 
ing all the round of her card-playing relations ? must 
my friend's brethren of necessity be mine also? must 
we be hand and glove with Dick Selby the parson, or 
Jack Selby the calico printer, because W. S., who is 
neither, but a ripe wit and a critic, has the misfortune 
to claim a common parentage with them? Let him 
lay down his brothers ; and 't is odds but we will cast 
him in a pair of our's (we have a superflux) to balance 
the concession. Let F. H. lay down his garrulous 
uncle ; and Honorius dismiss his vapid wife, and 
superfluous establishment of six boys — things be- 
tween boy and manhood — too ripe for play, too raw 
for conversation — that come in, impudently staring 
their father's old friend out of countenance ; and will 
neither aid, nor let alone, the conference : that we 
may once more meet upon equal terms, as we were 
wont to do in the disengaged state of bachelorhood. 

It is well if your friend, or mistress, be content 
with these canicular probations. Few young ladies 
but in this sense keep a dog. But when Rutilia 
hounds at you her tiger aunt ; or Ruspina expects 
you to cherish and fondle her viper sister, whom she 
has preposterously taken into her bosom, to try sting- 
ing conclusions upon your constancy ; they must not 
complain if the house be rather thin of suitors. Scylla 
must have broken oif many excellent matches in her 



236 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

time, if she insisted upon all, that loved her, loving 
her dogs also. 

An excellent story to this moral is told of Merry, 
of Delia Cruscan memory. In tender youth, he loved 
and courted a modest appanage to the Opera, in 
truth a dancer, who had won him by the artless con- 
trast between her manners and situation. She seemed 
to him a native violet, that had been transplanted by 
some rude accident into that exotic and artificial 
hotbed. Nor, in truth, was she less genuine and sin- 
cere than she appeared to him. He wooed and won 
this flower. Only for appearance' sake, and for due 
honour to the bride's relations, she craved that she 
might have the attendance of her friends and kindred 
at the approaching solemnity. The request was too 
amiable not to be conceded ; and in this solicitude 
for concihating the good will of mere relations, he 
found a presage of her superior attentions to himself, 
when the golden shaft should have " killed the flock 
of all afl'ections else." The morning came ; and at 
the Star and Garter, Richmond — the place appointed 
for the breakfasting — accompanied with one English 
friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforcements 
the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich 
muster she had made. They came in six coaches — 
the whole corps du ballet — French, ItaHan, men and 
women. Monsieur De B., the famous pirouetter of 
the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 



^17 



banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her 
excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there ; 
and Signor Sc — , and Signora Ch — , and Madame 
V — , with a countless cavalcade besides of chorusers, 
figurantes, at the sight of whom Merry afterwards de- 
clared, that "then for the first time it struck him 
seriously, that he was about to marry — a dancer." 
But there was no help for it. Besides, it was her day ; 
these were, in fact, her friends and kinsfolk. The 
assemblage, though whimsical, was all very natural. 
But when the bride — handing out of the last coach 
a still more extraordinary figure than the rest — pre- 
sented to him as hti father — the gentleman that was 
to give her away — no less a person than Signor Del- 
pini himself — with a sort of pride, as much as to 
say, See what I have brought to do us honour ! — the 
thought of so extraordinary a paternity quite overcame 
him ; and slipping away under some pretence from 
the bride and her motley adherents, poor Merry took 
horse from the back yard to the nearest sea-coast, from 
which, shipping himself to America, he shortly after 
consoled himself with a more congenial match in the 
person of Miss Brunton ; relieved from his intended 
clown father, and a bevy of painted Buffas for 
bridemaids. 



238 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

XIV. 

THAT WE SHOULD RISE WITH THE LARK. 

At what precise minute that little airy musician doffs 
his night gear, and prepares to tune up his unsea- 
sonable matins, we are not naturahsts enough to deter- 
mine. But for a mere human gentleman — that has 
no orchestra business to call him from his warm bed 
to such preposterous exercises — we take ten, or half 
after ten (eleven, of course, during this Christmas 
solstice), to be the very earliest hour, at which he 
can begin to think of abandoning his pillow. To 
think of it, we say ; for to^do it in earnest, requires 
another half hour's good consideration. Not but 
there are pretty sun-risings, as we are told, and such 
like gawds, abroad in the world, in summer time es- 
pecially, some hours before what we have assigned ; 
which a gentleman may see, as they say, only for get- 
ting up. But, having been tempted once or twice, 
in earlier life, to assist at those ceremonies, we confess 
our curiosity abated. We are no longer ambitious of 
being- the sun's courtiers, to attend at his morning 
levees. We hold the good hours of the dawn too 
sacred to waste them upon such observances ; which 
have in them, besides, something Pagan and Persic. 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 239 

To say truth, we never anticipated our usual hour, or 
got up with the sun (as 'tis called), to go a journey, 
or upon a fooHsh whole day's pleasuring, but we * 
suffered for it all the long hours after in hstlessness 
and headachs ; Nature herself sufficiently declaring 
her sense of our presumption, in aspiring to regulate 
our frail waking courses by the measures of that celes- 
tial and sleepless traveller. We deny not that there 
is something sprightly and vigorous, at the outset es- 
pecially, in these break-of-day excursions. It is 
flattering to get the start of a lazy world ; to conquer 
death by proxy in his image. But the seeds of sleep 
and mortality are in us ; and we pay usually in strange 
qualms, before night falls, the penalty of the unnatural 
inversion. Therefore, while the busy part of man- 
kind are fast huddling on their clothes, are already 
up and about their occupations, content to have 
swallowed their sleep by wholesale ; we choose to 
linger a-bed, and digest our dreams. It is the very 
time to recombine the wandering images, which night 
in a confused mass presented ; to snatch them from 
forgetfulness ; to shape, and mould them. Some 
people have no good of their dreams. Like fast 
feeders, they gulp them too grossly, to taste them 
curiously. We love to chew the cud of a foregone 
vision : to collect the scattered rays of a brighter 
phantasm, or act over again, with firmer nerves, the 
sadder nocturnal tragedies ; to drag into day-light a 



240 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

struggling and half-vanishing night -mare ; to handle 
and examine the terrors, or the airy solaces. We 
have too much respect for these spiritual communi- 
cations, to let them go so lightly. We are not so 
stupid, or so careless, as that Imperial forgetter of his 
dreams, that we should need a seer to remind us of the 
form of them. They seem to us to have as much sig- 
nificance as our waking concerns ; or rather to import 
us more nearly, as more nearly we approach by years 
to the shadowy world, whither we are hastening. We 
have shaken hands with the world's business ; we 
have done with it ; we have discharged ourself of it. 
Why should we get up? we have neither suit to 
solicit, nor affairs to manage. The drama has shut 
in upon us at the fourth act. We have nothing here 
to expect, but in a short time a sick bed, and a dis- 
missal. We delight to anticipate death by such 
shadows as night affords. We are already half ac- 
quainted with ghosts. We were never much in the 
world. Disappointment early struck a dark veil be- 
tween us and its dazzling illusions. Our spirits 
showed grey before our hairs. The mighty changes 
of the world already appear as but the vain stuff out 
of which dramas are composed. We have asked no 
more of life than what the mimic images in play- 
houses present us with. Even those types have 
waxed fainter. Our clock appears to have struck. 
We are superannuated. In this dearth of mundane 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 241 

satisfaction, we contract politic alliances with shadows. 
It IS good to have friends at court. The abstracted 
media of dreams seem no ill introduction to that 
spiritual presence, upon which, in no long time we 
expect to be thrown. We are trying to know a little 
of the usages of that colony; to learn the language 
and the faces we shall meet with there, that we may 
be the less awkward at our first coming among them 
We wilhngly call a phantom our fellow, as knowing 
we shall soon be of their dark companionship. 
Therefore, we cherish dreams. We try to spell in 
them the alphabet of the invisible world; and think 
we know already, how it shall be with us. Those 
uncouth shapes, which, while we clung to flesh and 
blood, affrighted us, have become familiar. We feel 
attenuated into their meagre essences, and have given 
the hand of half-way approach to incorporeal being 
We once thought life to be something; but it has 
unaccountably fallen from us before its time. There- 
fore we choose to dally with visions. The sun has 
no purposes of ours to light us to. Why should we 
get up? 

XV. 

THAT WE SHOULD LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB. 

We could never quite understand the philosophy of 
this arrangement, or the wisdom of our ancestors in 

16 



242 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

sending us for instruction to these woolly bedfellows. 
A sheep, when it is dark, has nothing to do but to 
shut his silly eyes, and sleep if he can. Man found 
out long sixes. — Hail candle-light! without dispar- 
agement to sun or moon, the kindliest luminary of 
the three — if we may not rather style thee their 
radiant deputy, mild viceroy of the moon ! — We 
love to read, talk, sit silent, eat, drink, sleep, by 
candle-light. They are everybody's sun and moon. 
This is our peculiar and household planet. Want- 
ing it, what savage unsocial nights must our ancestors 
have spent, wintering in caves and unillumined fast- 
nesses ! They must have lain about and grumbled 
at one another in the dark. What repartees could 
have passed, when you must have felt about for a 
smile, and handled a neighbour's cheek to be sure that 
he understood it? This accounts for the seriousness 
of the elder poetry. It has a sombre cast (try Hesiod 
or Ossian), derived from the tradition of those unlan- 
tern'd nights. Jokes came in with candles. We 
wonder how they saw to pick up a pin, if they had 
any. How did they sup? what a melange of chance 
carving they must have made of it ! — here one had 
got a leg of a goat, when he wanted a horse's shoulder 
— there another had dipt his scooped palm in a kid- 
skin of wild honey, when he meditated right mare's 
milk. There is neither good eating nor drinking in 
fresco. W^ho, even in these civilised times, has never 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 243 

experienced this, when at some economic table he 
has commenced dining after dusk, and waited for the 
flavour till the lights came? The senses absolutely 
give and take reciprocally. Can you tell pork from veal 
in the dark? or distinguish Sherris from pure Malaga? 
Take away the candle from the smoking man ; by the 
ghmmering of the left ashes, he knows that he is still 
smoking, but he knows it only by an inference; till 
the restored light, coming in aid of the olfactories, 
reveals to both senses the full aroma. Then how he 
redoubles his puffs ! how he burnishes ! — There is 
absolutely no such thing as reading, but by a candle. 
We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day 
in gardens, and in sultry arbours ; but it was labour 
thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come 
about you, hovering and teazing, like so many coquets, 
that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of 
your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writer 
digests his meditations By the same light, we must 
approach to their perusal, if we would catch the 
flame, the odour. It is a mockery, all that is re- 
ported of the influential Phoebus. No true poem 
ever owed its birth to the sun's light. They are 
abstracted works — 

"Things that were born, when none but the still night, 
And his dumb candle, saw his pinching throes." 

Marry, daylight — daylight might furnish the images, 
the crude material ; but for the fine shapings, the 



244 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

true turning and filing (as mine author hath it), they 
must be content to hold their inspiration of the 
candle. The mild internal light, that reveals them, 
like fires on the domestic hearth, goes out in the sun- 
shine. Night and silence call out the starry fancies. 
Milton's Morning Hymn on Paradise, we would hold 
a good wager, was penned at midnight ; and Taylor's 
richer description of a sun-rise smells decidedly of 
the taper. Even ourself, in these our humbler lucu- 
brations, tune our best measured cadences (Prose has 
her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the 
drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors;" or the 
wild sweep of winds at midnight. Even now a loftier 
speculation than we have yet attempted, courts our 
endeavours. We would indite something about the 
Solar System. — Betty, bruig the candles, 

XVI. 

THAT A SULKY TEMPER IS A MISFORTUNE. 

We grant that it is, and a very serious one — to a 
man's friends, and to all that have to do with him ; 
but whether the condition of the man himself is so 
much to be deplored, may admit of a question. We 
can speak a little to it, being ourself but lately re- 
covered — we whisper it in confidence, reader — out 
of a long and desperate fit of the sullens. Was the 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 245 

cure a blessing? The conviction which wrought it, 
came too clearly to leave a scruple of the fanciful 
injuries — for they were mere fancies — which had 
provoked the humour. But the humour itself was too 
self- pleasing, while it lasted — we know how bare we 
lay ourself in the confession — to be abandoned all 
at once with the grounds of it. We still brood over 
wrongs which we know to have been imaginary ; and 

for our old acquaintance, N , whom we find to 

have been a truer friend than we took him for, we 
substitute some phantom — a Caius or a Titius — as 
like him as we dare to form it, to wreak our yet un- 
satisfied resentments on. It is mortifying to fall at 
once from the pinnacle of neglect ; to forego the idea 
of having been ill-used and contumaciously treated 
by an old friend. The first thing to aggrandise a 
man in his own conceit, is to conceive of himself as 
neglected. There let him fix if he can. To unde- 
ceive him is to deprive him of the most tickling mor- 
sel within the range of self-complacency. No flattery 
can come near it. Happy is he who suspects his 
friend of an injustice ; but supremely blest, who thinks 
all his friends in a conspiracy to depress and under- 
value him. There is a pleasure (we sing not to the 
profane) far beyond the reach of all that the world 
counts joy — a deep, enduring satisfaction in the 
depths, where the superficial seek it not, of discontent. 
Were we to recite one half of this mystery, which we 



246 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

were let into by our late dissatisfaction, all the world 
would be in love with disrespect ; we should wear a 
slight for a bracelet, and neglects and contumacies 
would be the only matter for courtship. Unlike to 
that mysterious book in the Apocalypse, the study of 
this mystery is unpalatable only in the commence- 
ment. The first sting of a suspicion is grievous ; but 
wait — out of that wound, which to flesh and blood 
seemed so difficult, there is balm and honey to be 
extracted. Your friend passed you on such or such a 
day, — having in his company one that you conceived 
worse than ambiguously disposed towards you, — 
passed you in the street without notice. To be sure 
he is something short-sighted ; and it was in your power 
to have accosted him. But facts and sane inferences 
are trifles to a true adept in the science of dissatis- 
faction. He must have seen youj and S , who 

was with him, must have been the cause of the con- 
tempt. It galls you, and well it may. But have 
patience. Go home, and make the worst of it, and 
you are a made man from this time. Shut yourself 
up, and — rejecting, as an enemy to your peace, every 
whispering suggestion that but insinuates there may 
be a mistake — reflect seriously upon the many lesser 
instances which you had begun to perceive, in proof 
of your friend's disaffection towards you. None of 
them singly was much to the purpose, but the aggre- 
gate weight is positive; and you have this last affront 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 247 

to clench them. Thus far the process is anythmg 
but agreeable. But now to your relief comes in the 
comparative faculty. You conjure up all the kind 
feelings you have had for your friend ; what you 
have been to him, and what you would have been 
to him, if he would have suffered you ; how you de- 
fended him in this or that place ; and his good 
name — his literary reputation, and so forth, was 
always dearer to you than your own ! Your heart, 
spite of itself, yearns towards him. You could weep 
tears of blood but for a restraining pride. How say 
you ? do you not yet begin to apprehend a comfort ? 
some allay of sweetness in the bitter waters ? Stop 
not here, nor penuriously cheat yourself of your rever- 
sions. You are on vantage ground. Enlarge your 
speculations, and take in the rest of your friends, as 
a spark kindles more sparks. Was there one among 
them, who has not to you proved hollow, false, slippery 
as water? Begin to think that the relation itself is 
inconsistent with mortality. That the very idea of 
friendship, with its component parts, as honour, 
fidelity, steadiness, exists but in your single bosom. 
Image yourself to yourself, as the only possible friend 
in a world incapable of that communion. Now the 
gloom thickens. The little star of self-love twinkles, 
that is to encourage you through deeper glooms than 
this. You are not yet at the half point of your eleva- 
tion. You are not yet, believe me, half sulky enough. 



248 POPULAR FALLACIES. 

Adverting to the world in general, (as these circles in 
the mind will spread to infinity) reflect with what 
strange injustice you have been treated in quarters 
where, (setting gratitude and the expectation of 
friendly returns aside as chimeras,) you pretended 
no claim beyond justice, the naked due of all men. 
Think the very idea of right and fit fled from the 
earth, or your breast the solitary receptacle of it, till 
you have sweUed yourself into ~ at least one hemis- 
phere ; the other being the vast Arabia Stony of your 
friends and the world aforesaid. To grow bigger 
every moment in your own conceit, and the world 
to lessen : to deify yourself at the expense of your 
species ; to judge the world — this is the acme and 
supreme point of your mystery — these the true 
Pleasures of Sulkiness. We profess no more of 
this grand secret than what ourself experimented on 
one rainy afternoon in the last week, sulking in our 
study. We had proceeded to the penultimate point, 
at which the true adept seldom stops, where the con- 
sideration of benefit forgot is about to merge in the 
meditation of general injustice — when a knock at 
the door was followed by the entrance of the very 
friend, whose not seeing of us in the morning, (for 
we will- now confess the case our own), an accidental 
oversight, had given rise to so much agreeable gen- 
erahzation ! To mortify us still more, and take down 
the whole flattering superstructure which pride had 



POPULAR FALLACIES. 249 

piled upon neglect, he had brought in his hand the 

identical S , in whose favour we had suspected 

him of the contumacy. Asseverations were needless, 
where the frank manner of them both was convictive 
of the injurious nature of the suspicion. We fancied 
that they perceived our embarrassment ; but were too 
proud, or something else, to confess to the secret of 
it. We had been but too lately in the condition of 
the noble patient in Argos : 

Qui se credebat miros audire tragoedos, 
In vacuo laetus sessor plausorque theatro — 

and could have exclaimed with equal reason against 
the friendly hands that cured us — 

Pol me occidistis, amici, 
Non sarvastis, ait ; cui sic extorta voluptas 
Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error. 



THE END. 



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